ABSTRACT
Inventing Dixie: Literary Adaptation and the Hollywood Southern
Jared K. Wheeler, M.A.
Mentor: Sarah K. Ford, Ph.D.
Many people have never visited the American South, but everyone has “seen the
movie.” For nearly a century, American films have been the chief cultural arbiters of
southern regional identity in the popular imagination. However, the movie industry has
never created this image entirely from scratch. Instead, virtually all major film
representations of the South have come from literary works. With this in mind, I employ
adaptation theory to examine how the process of translating southern literature into film
has continually invented and reinvented the region for audiences throughout the twentieth
century and across a range of genres. Although this study can only begin to uncover the
complex forces that shape these cultural perceptions, several interesting patterns emerge.
In portraying the South, filmmakers have consistently sought authenticity while
achieving only the illusion of it because they remain largely unaware of the constructed
nature of the myths that films constantly reinforce.
Inventing Dixie: Literary Adaptation and the Hollywood Southern
by
Jared K. Wheeler, B.A.
A Thesis
Approved by the Department of English
___________________________________
Dianna M. Vitanza, Ph.D., Chairperson
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of
Baylor University in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
of
Master of Arts
Approved by the Thesis Committee
___________________________________
Sarah K. Ford, Ph.D., Chairperson
___________________________________
Coretta M. Pittman, Ph.D.
___________________________________
James Kendrick, Ph.D.
Accepted by the Graduate School
August 2010
___________________________________
J. Larry Lyon, Ph.D., Dean
Page bearing signatures is kept on file in the Graduate School.
Copyright © 2010 by Jared K. Wheeler
All rights reserved
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iv
DEDICATION .....................................................................................................................v
CHAPTERS
1. “No, But I’ve Seen the Movie:” Adaptation Theory and the Popular Image of the
South ..................................................................................................................1
2. Moonlight, Magnolias, and Movies: Adapting the Mythic South .........................18
3. City Monster, Country Monster: Southern Horror and the Adaptation of
Deliverance ......................................................................................................43
4. Large and Startling Figures: Adapting Wise Blood and the Christ-Haunted
South ................................................................................................................65
5. “Maybe Dixie’s Not the Right Song:” Adaptation and the Southern Identity
Crisis ................................................................................................................84
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................107
iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project has its origins in interests developed in my childhood, but many other
people have contributed to it, even before its conception. In particular, I wish to thank my
undergraduate professors: Dr. Watson, for introducing me to the serious academic study
of film, and Dr. Johnson, for indulging my fascination with southern literature, history,
and culture through many great discussions both in class and out.
I would like to thank my wife, Rachel, not only for her continued support and
encouragement throughout my graduate experience, but for serving as a frequent
proofreader and patient sounding board for ideas that she is far less interested in than I
am. Thanks also to my family, and to my friends Jonathan Wilson, Joshua Scholl, and
others for their assistance and interest from afar, and to my fellow graduate students at
Baylor for the atmosphere of scholarship and friendship they have helped create.
Finally, I give many thanks to the professors at Baylor for sharing their high level
of expertise throughout this long and often-taxing process. In particular: Thanks to Dr.
Pittman for her willingness to step in and provide much-needed assistance on short
notice. Thanks to Dr. Garrett for allowing me the opportunity to explore new academic
avenues. Thanks to Dr. Kendrick for welcoming me into his film classes, and for helpful
advice in areas beyond the normal scope of literary studies. Thanks especially to Dr.
Ford, for much excellent guidance through the weird world of southern studies, and for
keeping my scholarly ambitions grounded in the realistic without limiting my options.
Writing a thesis can be a lonely undertaking, but I have never wanted for input or
reassurance. Thank you all.
iv To Rachel
v CHAPTER ONE
“No, But I’ve Seen the Movie:” Adaptation Theory and the Popular Image of the South
“Tell about the South,” Shreve orders his Harvard roommate Quentin on a cold
January night in 1910. “What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live
there. Why do they live at all” (Faulkner 174). If William Faulkner had set his novel just
a few years later, Shreve might not have spent a sleepless night discussing those
questions. He might just have gone to the movies for answers instead. For nearly a
century, American films have been the chief cultural arbiters of southern regional
identity, at least in the popular imagination. Like the allegorical story of the region that
emerges in Absalom, Absalom!, the “cinematic South” is a crazy quilt of wildly different
experiences, each informed by a unique set of prejudices and preconceptions, stitched
roughly together into the semblance of a coherent whole. Facts, selected consciously or
otherwise by storytellers, are liberally mixed with outright fiction to produce an
artificially constructed image. Larry Langman and David Ebner suggest that it is
impossible to fully answer “to what extent these stereotypes were the product of the
movie industry or were arrived at independently.” Impossible or not, they concede that
“to underestimate the influence of Hollywood in determining these images would be a
mistake” (ix). Despite its undeniable influence over them, the movie industry has
certainly never created the images that it propagates entirely from scratch. In fact,
virtually all major film depictions of the South, beginning with The Birth of a Nation in
1915, have been adapted from literary works, which are also the inventions of a particular
1
cultural tradition. Peter Soderbergh quotes Faulkner as saying that “films of his works
were outstanding pictures and faithful to the original,” and laments that “the question of
how faithful the original might have been was one seldom considered” (18).
Southern literature, as Michael Kreyling attests, “is a cultural product, [...] a
product culturally and historically fabricated to local specifications by narratives that are
more or less cooperative [...] and more or less conscious” (ix). In other words, the
“South” that exists in southern literature is a construct that has evolved and developed
over time. Meanwhile, if southern literature is a fabricated “insider” account of the
region, then southern films are often distorted “outsider” versions of that account, and
may be that much less “true.” There are obviously many exceptions to this general rule,
and the relationship between southern literature and film is more complex than this
description suggests. Still, if the adaptation of these regional narratives does not
necessarily result in a less nuanced representation of reality, then neither does it tend
toward greater realism. The chief result of the adaptive process, ultimately, is an
immediately recognizable set of basic conventions and stereotypes, stock characters and
stories, controlling myths and master narratives; it is the brand that the nation collectively
identifies as “the South.” While Hollywood is not the only manufacturer of this cultural
product, its version is the most widely consumed. Many people have never visited the
American South or read its literature, but virtually everyone can claim that they have
“seen the movie.” Still, there are obviously significant connections between southern
literature and films about the South. A critical discussion of these connections can reveal
how and in what ways the process of adapting southern narratives into films has
2
continually invented and reinvented the region for movie audiences throughout the
twentieth century and across a range of genres.
Several avenues for scholarly discussion appear once the viewer has been alerted
to the fundamental artificiality of the cinematic South, and to its seemingly universal
currency among filmmakers and the film-going public. There have been a small handful
of attempts to comprehensively deal with cinematic representations of the South, but a
surprising number of possible lines of inquiry remain largely untouched, including the
relationship between southern film adaptations and their literary sources. In one early
account, “Hollywood and the South, 1930-1960” (1965), Peter Soderbergh briefly
surveys the previous three decades of filmic depictions of the South with an eye chiefly
toward broad trends and their success with audiences. He divides his discussion in half,
dealing first with the years before and during the Second World War and then with the
post-war period. This chronological summary is further subdivided into different types
of films: nostalgic stories which celebrated the Old South, and social “issue” films critical
of the New South during the first period, followed by a similar division in the second
period, but with the addition of the even more decadent “school of decay” portrayals of
contemporary southern life. His chief interest is in the films’ critical and box office
reception, both in the South and in other parts of the country, over the course of the
period discussed. This yields some interesting insights into differences in regional
perspectives, but ultimately says nothing about where these images come from or how
and why they take hold in the public imagination.
The depth of Soderbergh’s analysis is necessarily blunted by his brevity, and by
the sheer number of films that he describes. Nevertheless, he does pause for a few
3
remarks about particularly important films. His comments leave little doubt about the
overall effects of southern film images: “But what of the role played [...] in the
reinforcement and perpetuation of the common image [of the South]? Have our films
made pictorial contributions toward the dissipation - or the longevity - of 'exaggerated
views' of Southern society? The answer seems obvious” (15). More importantly, though,
Soderbergh notes each of the many films he lists that are adapted from a literary source.
Although he does not discuss any specific aspects of the adaptation process, he does
observe that, when “one thinks back [...] it becomes all too evident that the novels and
plays relevant to the South have with few exceptions made material available to the
studios which has been anything but complimentary in the eyes of non-Southern
elements” (18). It is particularly interesting that Soderbergh lays the blame for this result
as much on the material being adapted as on the studios responsible for the final product,
but he concludes the article before developing this line of thought any further.
Fred Chappell takes a similar approach to classification and description in “The
Image of the South in Film” (1978). He begins by stating that “The film image of the
south generally breaks down into two very broad categories: the south as Eden and the
south as Hell” (303), and proceeds in those terms. The bulk of Chappell’s essay, like
Soderbergh’s, is spent in dealing with the latter of the two categories. However, he offers
even less description of individual films, instead supplying a lengthy laundry list of titles
associated with each subgroup of films. Although there is some interest in the way
Chappell groups certain films together in particular categories, what little analysis he
offers is merely thinly disguised expressions of annoyance. The entire article could well
be characterized as a blast of academic frustration, for which he offers “All this heavy
4
metaphor makes it hard to think calmly” by way of excuse. Even so, although he does
not contribute meaningfully to the task himself, he does indicate the need for further
inquiry:
There are other visions of the south as Hell that might be investigated. There is
the Hell of Family (The Little Foxes), the Hell of Paganism (Suddenly Last
Summer, Deliverance), of Poverty (Tobacco Road), of Debased Humanism (The
Glass Menagerie) [...] These films and others lie in the canisters, awaiting the
vigilant and intrepid explorer.
He also concludes with one particularly significant insight into the production of these
films: “In most films about the south, the film makers are saying, ‘See, it's just as you
thought. I told you so.’ And so they have, time and again” (311). Movie audiences see a
South that matches their own perception of the region. However, just as the public goes
to the movies and finds the South that they expect to find, filmmakers have often pointed
their cameras at the South (or at a studio backlot) and captured what they expect to
capture. What this article fails to grasp is that in many cases, perhaps more than Chappell
would be willing to grant, filmmakers are largely as unaware of their own cultural
assumptions as their audiences are, and in cases where they are filming a literary work
(serving merely as “translators” of what is already there), complacency about regional
stereotypes is more likely, not less.
Also in 1978, Jack Kirby completed a book-length study, Media-Made Dixie: The
South in the American Imagination, which was later revised for a new edition in 1986.
Kirby’s approach is the most complete discussion of the various media forces that have
contributed to cultural perceptions of the South, and remains the definitive, and most
frequently cited, treatment of its subject. As the title implies, Kirby deals with, not only
film (though film receives the most attention), but also histories, literature, radio,
television, music, sports, politics, and so forth. His emphasis is more on surface
5
connections between different media and their effects on the American imagination,
rather than any extensive analysis of individual works. His book is a history of popular
culture, and is chiefly concerned with movements and trends. Most of Kirby’s chapters
divide depictions of the region into categories (much as the previous assessments had),
including “The Embarrassing New South,” “The Grand Old South,” “The Visceral
South,” and “The Devilish South.” Like Soderbergh, he shows an awareness of the
importance of southern literature with respect to film, but never seems to distinguish
between a film and the novel on which it is based. For the purposes of his discussion,
differences notwithstanding, they are effectively a single work.
Two more books appeared in 1981: The Celluloid South: Hollywood and the
Southern Myth by Edward Campbell, Jr., and The South and Film, a critical anthology
edited by Warren French, to which Campbell also contributed an essay. French makes a
valiant attempt to impose some larger, connective vision on the essays in The South and
Film, but ultimately they are too disparate in focus, and many deal with topics (such as
the difficulties MGM experienced in filming The Yearling) that are far too marginal to
contribute to French’s chief interest: the attempt “to create a Southern film genre” (13).
This idea, outlined in some detail by French in his introduction, is the work’s most
interesting contribution to the conversation, but French’s efforts are only rarely
mentioned in later discussions of southern film. Campbell’s work, on the other hand, is
in many ways less dated than even Kirby’s study because it focuses almost exclusively on
an early period of film history, and on a genre that has faded into virtual non-existence.
Campbell devotes the first four chapters of his book to films made before 1941, followed
by a single chapter discussing the forty years afterward. As his subtitle indicates,
6
Campbell is almost exclusively interested in developments pertaining to “the Southern
Myth”; that is, romanticized stories about plantation life in the Old South. Campbell’s
book is invaluable with regards to its subject, but obviously limited with respect to the
totality of southern literature and film. However, where most scholarly discussions have
given the bulk of their attention to negative depictions of the South in movies,
Campbell’s approach is entirely the reverse. He also makes some interesting
observations about the relationship between a few novels and the films based on them,
but he shares with Kirby a more general tendency to conflate the two.
Few major studies have approached the subject of the South and film since the
flurry of interest in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Three more recent works, however,
bear mentioning: J.W. Williamson’s Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains
and What the Mountains Did to the Movies (1995), Allison Graham’s Framing the South:
Hollywood, Television, and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle (2001), and
Hollywood’s Image of the South: A Century of Southern Film (2001), compiled by Larry
Langman and David Ebner. In the preface to their book, Langman and Ebner echo
French’s ambition to “establish the ‘southern’ as a legitimate film genre” (ix). Their
approach, though, could not be more different. Almost devoid of critical analysis, this is
essentially a bibliography of southern films, listing titles with a brief plot summary,
occasionally supplemented by further historical context, production information, or
critical and popular reception. The book includes several hundred titles, all listed
alphabetically within 20 chapters organized by topic. Each chapter begins with a short
description of its topic. This method of organization leaves a great deal to be desired. A
small scattering of films appear twice, but the logic behind why a particular film belongs
7
in one category more than another remains frustratingly obscure. For instance, Jezebel
(1938) appears under both “Southern Aristocrats” and “Southern Belles,” but not under
“Plantation Life,” “Slaves and Slavery,” or “Social Conditions.” Gone with the Wind is
listed with “Plantation Life” and “Family Survival” (only one entry mentions the
Margaret Mitchell novel), but not “Southern Belles,” “The Civil War,” or
“Reconstruction and the Carpetbaggers.” The book would be far more navigable if all
titles were listed alphabetically, and the themes in each film included as part of the
summary. Nevertheless, the comprehensiveness of this volume is impressive and
obviously useful as an aid to further analysis.
Williamson and Graham have produced more topical approaches to southern film
representations. Williamson, obviously, deals with how depictions of the hillbilly (or
“cracker,” “redneck,” “white trash,” etc.) stereotype have evolved over time. Like most,
he divides his study into distinct topics: “The Hillbilly as Fool,” “The Hillbilly as Social
Bandit,” “Hillbilly Gals,” and so forth. Although Williamson deals with almost no film
adaptations in his study, he delivers excellent critical insights into those few that he
discusses. Meanwhile, Graham delves deeply into how a variety of different media
(television, film, journalism, etc.) have dealt with race in the South, focused mostly on
the decade following the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court in
1954. The first four chapters of her book are devoted to the framework of racial
depictions she describes as having been established during this period. The final chapter
briefly traces the legacy of these depictions through to the mid-1990s (her analysis
culminates with a discussion of the popularity of Forrest Gump in 1994, but she also
mentions films released as late as 1999). Her approach is most reminiscent of Kirby’s in
8
that it is wide-ranging and impeccably researched, but she also gives more attention to
analysis of individual works, whether of novels, television shows, or films. Her purpose
in doing this is to draw attention to “specific aspects of the cinematic redemption of
whiteness” (16), rather than to illuminate the translation of individual narratives across
media.
This is essentially how academic approaches to cinematic depictions of the South
have proceeded since the 1960s, with very limited attention paid to the role of adaptation
and the nature of the process. And, if these discussions of films have only a little to say
about the role of literature, analysis of literature has even less to say about film. This
general rule applies as much to scholarly articles as to longer studies. Critical discussions
of literature almost never mention any existing film adaptations, while critical discussions
of films only occasionally explore literary sources in any depth. However, in instances
where both a novel and the film based on it have achieved some popular or critical
success, scholarly discussions of the adaptation process exist, albeit focused on the
individual work in question with limited attention to larger genre or regional contexts.
Discussions of individual works relevant to this study are addressed in specific chapters.
The theoretical framework for many of these individual approaches, as for this study, has
its origins in Novels into Film (1957), George Bluestone’s seminal exploration of
adaptation theory.
Examinations of adaptation between novel and film require a unique set of
assumptions, and must be prefaced with some words of explanation and qualification.
Critics frequently cite two quotes as part of the foundation for their inquiry into
adaptation theory. In the preface to The Nigger of Narcissus (1897), Joseph Conrad says,
9
“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the powers of the written word, to make you
hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see” (qtd. in McFarlane 3). This
sentiment was echoed by filmmaking pioneer D.W. Griffith in 1913: “The task I am
trying to achieve is above all to make you see” (qtd. in McFarlane 4). Griffith’s words,
though probably drawn consciously from Conrad, seem to highlight an early confluence
of intent between the artistic ambitions of the modern novelist and those of the narrative
filmmaker. Despite this obvious connection, and despite the fact that motion pictures
turned immediately to literary sources for much of their material, serious attempts at a
comprehensive theory to discuss the process of transformation from written word into
projected image only really began with Bluestone in 1957. Bluestone’s approach dealt
for the first time with the delicate process by which a narrative is translated between two
very different art forms. However, in spite of this foundation, the most common critical
method of discussing a film that has been adapted from a novel continued to center on
detailed discussions of the given film’s alterations to the original text for the purpose of
evaluating the film’s faithfulness to its source. This is known as fidelity criticism.
Film scholar Brian McFarlane’s 1996 work on adaptation theory, Novel to Film,
sought to reassess the usefulness of fidelity criticism. Arguing that the question of
fidelity is misplaced as the course along which adaptation studies has developed since
Bluestone, McFarlane claims that this approach falsely assumes that any given text has a
single, agreed-upon meaning which the filmmaker has either represented faithfully or not.
Inevitably, however, this sort of assessment is “a doomed enterprise” and
“unilluminating” because a film can only be faithful to a single reading of a text; a
reading which is unlikely to coincide with the views of most of the audience (9).
10
Ultimately, adaptation criticism can never fully escape the fidelity question; it is simply
unavoidable. Any discussion of an adaptation must at least begin by examining what has
been altered. However, in contrast with fidelity criticism, here “differences are no longer
treated as […] unfaithfulness toward the literary source. They are studied as the
symptoms of other norms and models which […] have overruled the model of the literary
novel” (Cattrysse 224). The convention that dictates the average runtime of a featurelength film, requiring a novel’s plot to be condensed, is one example of such a norm.
McFarlane advocates an approach that 1) stresses the intertextuality at work in any
convergence of distinct art forms, 2) can successfully differentiate between literary
elements that are directly transferrable and those which must be adapted to film, and 3)
can identify the cinematic and cultural contexts which influence a film version without
having anything to do with its source. McFarlane also suggests that critics develop an
awareness of different forms of adaptation, and be able to differentiate between whether
the filmmaker is attempting to transpose a literary work directly onto the screen, to
deliberately alter the work in order to comment on it, or to use the work as a point of
departure for a different work of art entirely (analogy). However, it is possible that a film
adaptation might represent a combination of more than one of these forms.
Meanwhile, although useful as a point of reference, McFarlane’s own semiotic
focus is far too rigorously structured. While rightly cautioning against allowing
subjective criticism to define critical assessment of an adaptation’s success, McFarlane
fails to allow enough flexibility for critical exploration. His most useful contribution is in
suggesting principles rather than prescribing methods. Drawing on the approach of
McFarlane and others, Maureen Quinn defines adaptation as “an expression of a novel in
11
which we are allowed to see the collaborative vision of others” (20). Quinn proposes a
method which views adaptation as an invitation to engage in a critical dialog with both
the film and the novel. Central to this approach is the assumption that, with respect to
adaptation, any consideration of a film and its literary source as completely separate
offers only a limited perspective on each; only by considering them together can there be
a dialog that emphasizes both works as an intertextual unit, allowing each the potential to
modify or illuminate the other. More importantly, an open examination of multiple
approaches to the same material can reveal more clearly what each work is intended to
accomplish, which can in turn help to indicate why a given telling was undertaken in a
particular way. The application of Quinn’s view of intertextuality shows that a literary
work’s only inherent advantage over an adaptation is in having existed first. This need
not be considered an advantage at all. Once a novel has become a film, neither text can
exist in a vacuum anymore. Privileging novel over film in a discussion about adaptation
should be regarded as a pointless exercise in recreating the circumstances from before the
film existed. The greater an adaptation’s success as a film, the more it will be able to
bring to a critical conversation with its original source about the narrative they both
share. Any useful application of adaptation theory, then, must consider literary and
cinematic narrative as basically of equal importance for the purposes of analysis.
However, despite the importance of intertextuality in achieving a balanced
reading of both novel and film, it is equally important to account for the extratextual
forces that have influenced the film, and perhaps even the novel. This requires that the
critic understand both novels and films as works which “have histories and are in turn
grounded in history” (Larsson qtd. in Kline 74). John Ellis’s description of the contrast
12
between the generally assumed aim of a given adaptation and its true aim points to this
essential dimension in considerations of the relationship between the adaptation process
and stereotypical film images of the South. The assumed aim of adaptation is, of course,
“to reproduce the contents of the novel on the screen.” This is the basic assumption both
of fidelity criticism and of fans of the novel: “The whole marketing strategy of
adaptations from literary classics or from ‘bestsellers’ encourages such an assessment.”
The reason for this encouragement lies in the true aim of adaptation. Ellis explains that,
in actuality:
[A]daptation trades upon the memory of the novel, a memory that can derive from
actual reading, or, as is more likely with a classic of literature, a generally
circulated cultural memory. The adaptation consumes this memory, aiming to
efface it with the presence of its own images. The successful adaptation is one
that is able to replace the memory of the novel with the process of a filmic […]
representation. (3)
This explanation clearly reveals the chief source of audience and critical frustration with
adaptations of which they disapprove; the film has failed to successfully replace the
memory of the novel. This process can even work the other way in the case of reading an
obscure novel on which a particularly beloved film is based. Furthermore, Ellis may well
have accounted for the previously discussed tendency of analysis of southern films to
conflate them with the novels on which they are based. The films in question have
successfully replaced the novels in the critics’ memories, at least with respect to general
perceptions of the South. In actuality, though, these perceived similarities can be
completely misleading, indicating a blind spot in the current academic understanding of
what has actually transpired at those critical cultural points of contact where adaptation
happens, and pointing again to the significance of adaptation theory in guiding a balanced
assessment.
13
With respect to southern film, an adaptation may trade as much on “a generally
circulated cultural memory” of what the South is “really like,” as it does on the memory
of the novel. In fact, the filmmaker’s ability to portray the South as audiences expect to
see it is much more likely to successfully “efface” the novel’s images with the presence
of the film’s images. This indicates that additional sources of inspiration for a film
generally exist, even if it has been adapted from a novel, and even if that adaptation is
considered essentially “faithful” to the novel. With regards to southern film, whether
cultural memory as an additional source is a product of audience expectations,
filmmakers’ perceptions, or (more likely) some combination of the two, if it remains
entirely unaccounted for, the subsequent analysis will inevitably be distorted.
This explanation of the critical theory of adaptation indicates several practices
with respect to methodology. In the assessment and discussion of individual works, the
approach in this study remains chiefly concerned with: 1) describing how the process of
adaptation took place, 2) accounting for specific elements of the literary and filmic texts
and identifying extratextual sources for points where the two differ, and 3) suggesting
possible reasons for this divergence with respect to the various cultural traditions within
which these narratives operate. The most obvious way to go about these tasks differs
somewhat with respect to each work. However, each case requires a discussion of the
critical context of both novel and film, and their immediate historical and cultural
context. In addition to discussing different works, each chapter also develops its analysis
in connection with a different general approach. The purpose of this is twofold: First, to
select the approach that is best suited to revealing the cultural mechanisms driving texts
that have very little in common beyond a shared connection with the South. Second, to
14
attempt to indicate the vast space in southern studies that has yet to be explored. The
former is simply an obvious and necessary component of good scholarship. The latter
must serve as a corrective to the necessary brevity of a study which can only qualify as an
introduction to a line of inquiry in which much remains to be done.
One additional facet of adaptation theory that requires awareness is the question
of authorship. A novel, though analyses of it may often describe the influence of
previous authors or other people, has a clearly identifiable author as its creator. Films
are, by their very nature, much more collaborative endeavors, involving screenwriters,
producers, directors, performers, cinematographers, and a host of additional creative and
technical personnel at work behind the scenes. Ever since the 1950s, auteur theory has
held that the director is a film’s primary author. More recently, the Schreiber theory has
attempted to shift primary credit for the creative vision to the screenwriter. However,
under the studio system during the early days of Hollywood, a film’s producer often
exercised primary control. The reality is that authorship will vary from film to film, and
while some have a clear primary author, others involve many people equally, making it
difficult or impossible to determine who contributed the most to the finished film. The
discussions of individual adaptations in this study seek to take this into account wherever
authorship is relevant, identifying the primary creative force behind a film when possible,
and at least identifying any additional people who may have contributed significantly to
the work.
Chapters Two through Five are organized more or less chronologically with
respect to the filmic texts that they discuss. However, of greater significance is the larger
“narrative” to which each chapter contributes as part of a historical delineation of the
15
major trends in dominant cultural depictions of the South and of the varied roles that
adaptation has played in support of those depictions:
Chapter Two explores the national development of a mythic South which began
after the Civil War, and in particular this mythology’s significance to a genre of
American films prior to the Second World War. The key texts considered are The
Clansman by Thomas Dixon, Jr., D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, and
the novel and film versions of Gone with the Wind. The analysis of these four works
seeks to interrogate the general assumption that they are ideologically homogenous; an
assumption which tends to obscure their essential dissimilarities, and consequently, the
external cultural forces which both altered them and made them appear monolithic in
their depictions of plantation life and the antebellum South. This chapter also deals with
the nature of claims of historical accuracy in films about the 19th-century South.
Chapter Three discusses the cultural reversal which led to a sharp decline in the
popularity of stories glorifying the South in favor of stories of southern abjection which
depicted the region as a cultural other with respect to the rest of the nation. The argument
centers on the region’s growing connection with the horror genre, and pays particular
attention to the novel and film versions of Deliverance as the culmination of developing
depictions of the South that made it the ideal cinematic setting for a distinctly American
form of horror film. In doing so, this examination highlights some of the ways in which
films seek to create and shape reality.
Chapter Four turns from broad trends and genre discussions to examine John
Huston’s 1979 adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel Wise Blood. This serves
both as a contrast with Deliverance, and as an interesting case of clashing regional and
16
ideological perspectives between two major artistic personalities that resulted in a
surprisingly anomalous film. The discussion also explores a different side of the
cinematic objective of verisimilitude via the director’s search for a compromise between
his vision, the author’s vision, and reality.
Chapter Five describes the crisis of cultural identity experienced by southern
characters in novel-to-film and historical adaptations that emerged out of a period of
heightened interest in the Civil Rights Movement and stories of racial conflict. This
chapter highlights the way that these stories prompt their southern characters to reject
their own identity, and accounts for the way that the narratives both resurrect and rewrite
the region’s past, blurring the line between fact and fiction. The novel and film versions
of A Time to Kill and The Chamber are the main focus of the discussion, but some
attention is directed towards other films which form the context in which these films were
made. The chapter concludes by questioning the cultural implications of turning to
frequently and vividly to the region’s darker past for film representations.
One major connective thread that emerges from analyzing the adaptation process
is the wide variety of ways in which filmmakers have consistently sought, or claimed to
seek, authenticity in their portrayals of the South. The result, over and over, is that these
films have usually achieved only the illusion of authenticity because their creators remain
largely unaware of, or indifferent to, the constructed nature of the myths that films
constantly reinforce, and even sometimes create. However, the question each chapter
seeks to address is to what extent these constructions are a product of perpetuation by
film depictions (knowingly or not), and to what extent these films merely transmit ideas
from their literary sources.
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CHAPTER TWO
Moonlight, Magnolias, and Movies: Adapting the Mythic South
The “southern” and the “western” are both genres of American film intimately
connected to distinct regions of the country. However, where westerns have long since
transcended the geographical boundaries of the American West, the southern does not
venture outside the group of states located below the Mason-Dixon Line. The obvious
reason for this is that the myth of the American West is one of progress, opportunity,
individualism, and of the adventure and excitement of life at the margins of civilization.
Meanwhile, the myth of the American South is a pseudo-historical epic of lost innocence
and of the extinction of an idealized way of life. Its equivalent to the lawless frontier
town setting is the stately antebellum plantation, its heroes are the refined southern
gentleman or belle, and its villains are the Yankee soldier or carpetbagger, the poor white
scalawag, and the black freedman. Unmoored from its historical or regional trappings,
the “southern” simply isn’t southern anymore. Still, despite this inherent lack of
mutability, southern films have captivated enormous audiences for over a century. The
Birth of a Nation (1915), based on Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman, was the most
profitable film ever made until the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937.
Two years later, Gone with the Wind, based on the Margaret Mitchell novel, was released
to thunderous acclaim and shattered all previous records, remaining the most widely seen
film of all time to this day. While the novels these films are based on were also popular
bestsellers in their day, as Edward Campbell explains, “For the most part the
18
[romanticized] interpretation has been presented in film […] which makes the antebellum
society impressively real to an audience no writer could ever hope to influence” (4).
Indeed, these films have left a deep impression in the popular imagination,
depicting an antebellum South that embodied virtues like courage, grace, hospitality,
nobility, and respectability; all while glossing over the effects of slavery on both master
and slave. Both films, and other less significant examples of plantation fiction, adhered
so firmly to genre conventions that they replaced the historical reality in the minds of
contemporary audiences, and cast a long shadow across cultural perceptions of the South
as it existed before, during, and immediately after the Civil War. Campbell goes so far as
to attribute most of the “modern misunderstanding of the region, by natives and outsiders
alike,” to “a persistent mythology willingly accepted by countless audiences” (14). The
success of both films has also somewhat supplanted the novels on which they are based.
Who today has ever heard of Thomas Dixon, let alone read his work? And who could
read Mitchell’s novel without picturing Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in the roles of
Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler?
Furthermore, on the surface, discussions of all four narratives (both novels and
both films) have long reduced them to the similarities that contributed to their enormous
cultural influence over the larger regional mythology. However, closer analysis reveals
important differences in the way each novel deals with matters such as history, politics,
gender, race, and southern identity. These subtleties are significantly muted by the film
versions in favor of appealing to the expectations of a wide national audience, and have
remained largely ignored by audiences and critics alike. Despite their obvious
involvement in perpetuating misconceptions about the region, the cultural significance of
19
these novels as interpretations of the southern myth cannot be fully understood without
an examination of the differences between them, and of the adaptation process that
realigned them with normative cultural images of the South.
Considering the circumstances which led Thomas Dixon, inspired by strong
cultural, historical, political, and personal forces, to write The Clansman, its production
seems almost inevitable. Born in North Carolina in 1864, he was five years old when he
witnessed his first lynching, carried out with the active participation of his father, older
brother, and two uncles. His maternal uncle, Colonel LeRoy MacAfee, was a local leader
in the Ku Klux Klan, in charge of all of the chapters in the surrounding counties, and
Dixon claimed to have played the key role of messenger for his uncle during several
important Klan-related activities. Most of his childhood transpired during the years of
Reconstruction, and the memories of that time recounted in his autobiography mirror
incidents from his novels almost scene-for-scene in some cases. Interestingly, many of
the major plot points from The Clansman resurfaced in Southern Horizons, Dixon’s
unpublished autobiography, composed late in his life.
However, by the time he began to apply his own unique spin to the glowing
mythology of the Old South early in the twentieth century, much of it was already wellestablished by decades of popular regional fiction written in a spirit of reconciliation and
post-war nostalgia. Many of the genre conventions were popularized, if not established,
by the widely read regional fiction of Joel Chandler Harris and the best-selling
sentimental novels of Thomas Nelson Page. Ironically, though, one of the most
prominent influences on plantation fiction was the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Thanks to the absence of copyright, dramatic versions of
20
Stowe’s novel were being staged while the novel itself was still appearing in serial form
in 1851-2. “Tom shows” went on to become one of the most wide-spread and popular
forms of American entertainment throughout the rest of the century and into the early
1900s, with unexpected repercussions. As Eric Lott explains, “for every one of the three
hundred thousand who bought the novel in its first year, many more eventually saw the
play. [...] but even in the version most faithful to Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin was
itself a compromise between antislavery politics and established entertainment
conventions” (212). The message of the story, as it was imagined, re-imagined, and even
parodied on stages across the nation, proved surprisingly malleable, and according to
Lott, the “Tom show” depiction of antebellum life (including kindly masters and
contented, well-kept slaves) is likely the single most important contributor to popular
depictions of southern plantation life. In addition to setting the scene for plantation
fiction, Uncle Tom’s Cabin played another role in inspiring Dixon’s work. In 1901,
Dixon was driven to become a novelist in order to tell the “real story” of the South after
he had witnessed a Tom show and “wept at its misrepresentation of Southerners” (Slide
21). The next year saw the publication of his first novel, The Leopard’s Spots: A
Romance of the White Man’s Burden 1865-1900.
Dixon’s historical fiction, where not directly inspired by his personal experiences,
was reinforced by historians of the so-called “Dunning School” of Reconstruction
historiography. This account described a time of chaos, brought on by a Radical
Republican quest for political power through enfranchisement and manipulation of blacks
and disfranchisement of whites. Although heavily fictionalized and openly didactic,
Dixon insisted that his novels were completely faithful to historical fact. In a note
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introducing The Leopard’s Spots, he declared, “The only serious liberty I have taken with
history is to tone down the facts to make them credible in fiction. […] It will be a century
yet before people outside the South can be made to believe a literal statement of the
history of those times” (x). However, a quote from a character in one of his later novels
reveals a clearer picture of Dixon’s philosophy of history: “It’s what we call fiction, but I
think fiction’s the very best history we can read. It may not have happened just that way
but it’s true all the same” (qtd. in Slide v). By the time he published his best-selling
second novel, The Clansman, in 1905, he had perfected this literary formula and was
ready to conquer new audiences, quickly overseeing the production of a stage version as
well.
Picking up immediately after the Civil War has ended, The Clansman follows the
interrelated fortunes of two families, the Stonemans from the North, and the Camerons
from the South, through the tumultuous and terrifying effects of Reconstruction on the
Camerons’ hometown, culminating in the formation of the Ku Klux Klan and its
subsequent salvation of civilization itself from black rule imposed by vengeful northern
politicians. The story is didactic above all else, and dialogue that does not serve to make
some explicit point for the author is rare. The novel’s central characteristic is its racial
discourse, and criticism of it has proceeded almost exclusively in racial terms. Dixon’s
essential message, here as in many of his other novels, is that two distinct races cannot
coexist in a single nation, and that racial mixing is a path to destruction for both black
and white (but especially white). His rhetoric consistently elevates white civilization,
culture, and accomplishments, while associating blacks with bestial terminology again
and again. Furthermore, the consequence he envisions of complete freedom and equality
22
for African Americans is the wanton sexual desecration of white womanhood. Dixon
conflates southern identity with white male identity, and his explorations of history,
portrayals of gender dynamics, and use of established tropes about southern culture are
all directed in support of his racial, patriarchal ideology.
Dixon’s play toured the nation successfully, journeying throughout the South,
West, and Midwest before arriving in New York early in 1906, and finally brought his
dreams of answering Uncle Tom’s Cabin to fruition just a few short years after he had
sworn to do so. Dixon had harbored ambitions of being an actor years before, and he was
initially thrilled by the experience of touring with his play, frequently availing himself of
the opportunity to address the audience before the curtain rose or after it had gone down,
and reveling in the immediacy of their approval. However, he eventually began to feel
that even this medium could not offer him the exposure he so desperately wanted, and his
attention was drawn to the fledgling art of motion pictures. He had already noticed that
“Few people read the [...] histories” and even though The Clansman “was a best seller
([...] about a quarter million copies),” he now saw that “movie theaters drew millions”
(Kirby 8). Meanwhile, D.W. Griffith, already a successful director, was looking for an
appropriate subject on which he could base a feature-length film, something which had
not yet been seriously attempted by American filmmakers. Griffith was a southerner as
well, born in Kentucky, the son of Colonel Jacob “Roaring Jake” Griffith. Growing up,
Griffith’s father had regaled him with wild stories of his adventures in the Confederate
Army. Dixon’s story immediately captured his imagination with its possibilities, and he
set to work conducting the historical research which would be necessary to bring their
combined vision dramatically to life.
23
No historical detail was too small not to merit Griffith’s attention, but his quest
for authenticity was a deceptive one. “Inordinate attention to minor details provided
authenticity for an interpretation which was itself not accurate. Time was devoted not to
the thesis but to its trappings, and the surface detail simply obscured the interpretation's
underlying weaknesses” (Campbell 49). For example, a scene depicting the state’s blackdominated legislature is preceded in the film by a title card which declares the scene to be
“AN HISTORICAL FACSIMILE of the State House of Representatives of South
Carolina as it was in 1870. After photograph by ‘The Columbia State.’” However, many
of the individual incidents in the scene that follows, which include a black representative
removing his shoes and placing them up on the desk in front of him, were drawn from
political cartoons of the era rather than from accurate historical accounts. In any case, the
prevailing historical interpretation of the time only confirmed Griffith’s and Dixon’s own
assumptions about the period they were portraying, leading them to accept and perpetuate
it without question. In the end, the finished film “amounted to a completion of a great
historiographical tour through the media of the day” (Kirby 7). However, Campbell
highlights the conflict between historical fact and cultural fiction presented by this
cinematic approach to the region, and raises a troubling question:
[O]n one level a film's concept of the South was an attempt to convince the
general public of its veracity. On another level, the cinematic portrayal took into
account the desires of the audience and played upon the viewer's preconceptions.
Hollywood's conceptualization and the public's imagination eventually became
mutually supportive. Once caught in the reciprocal exchange of beliefs, did either
the film industry or its audience realize that they were reinforcing the myth?
(Campbell 20)
In this case, of course, the origins of this reciprocal exchange of beliefs extend even
further into the past than the beginning of cinema, and it seems unlikely that either
24
Griffith or his audience could have been aware of their role in the process that Campbell
describes.
Meanwhile, despite Dixon’s outspoken admiration for The Birth of a Nation, and
the obvious confluence between his and Griffith’s approach to the material, noteworthy
differences exist between the film and The Clansman which illuminate the mythmaking
process outlined above. Adaptations of written works into silent film are unique in that
they require the translation of the purely literary into the purely visual, and only a very
small percentage of a novel’s dialogue or exposition can be carried over. In the case of
Griffith’s vision for The Birth of a Nation, Dixon’s essential message was stripped of his
shallow characterization and inflammatory use of language, and transformed into a
powerful affirmation of Aryan brotherhood populated by strong archetypes representing
good and evil. Part of the difference between the two narratives stems from the fact that
the cinematic constraints which produced Griffith’s film images allows them a greater
effect than Dixon’s florid prose can achieve. Thus, where Dixon describes the villainous
Gus with absurd grotesqueries (“his lips so thick they curled both ways up and down with
crooked blood-marks across them […] sinister bead eyes […] gleamed ape-like […]
enormous cheek-bones and jaws seemed to protrude beyond the ears”) (216), Griffith
merely shows Gus (a white actor in blackface) behaving in ways that inspired his white
audience to feelings of hatred and disgust. However, The Birth of a Nation also adds a
great deal to Dixon’s story and simplifies character relationships in order to add weight to
its own thematic approach and to depict the South of Griffith’s imagination.
The Birth of a Nation begins its story much earlier than The Clansman, although
many of these scenes depict events that are merely described via dialogue in the novel.
25
An early title card declares that “The bringing of the African to America planted the first
seed of disunion,” followed by images of a Puritan minister speaking a blessing over a
group of newly arrived slaves. In the novel, Ben Cameron declares, “When a slaver
arrived at Boston, your pious Puritan clergyman offered public prayer of thanks” (124).
In the novel, however, this line is part of a lengthy expository scene in which Ben is
explaining the history of slavery in order to correct Elsie Stoneman’s misconceptions
about him and his region, hoping to win her hand. Griffith (with the collaboration of coscreenwriter Frank E. Woods) disconnects it from this context and uses it as the starting
point of his grand historical narrative, tracing all of the conflict which will follow over
the next three hours back to this point. In this conception of history, the victims of
slavery are also guilty of the conflict slavery will later cause, and the presence of the
black race on American soil serves to drive members of the white race apart. Griffith
builds this idea throughout the next several scenes, modifying the novel so that Ben
Cameron and Phil Stoneman know each other and are good friends before the war begins.
Griffith also invents additional siblings for both men, making them friends as well. This
allows for a series of scenes in which the Stoneman boys visit the Cameron family during
the days before the war, and establishes an important context which is absent from the
novel. Here Griffith makes the story’s stakes clear; this is what the characters stand to
lose as a result of racially provoked conflict.
These early scenes, in which the Stonemans tour the Cameron’s plantation,
“where life runs in a quaintly way that is to be no more,” are not drawn from any
description of Dixon’s, but from previously established antebellum stereotypes.
26
Recollections by Griffith’s assistant camera operator, Karl Brown, point to the
significance of this tradition in the realization of the antebellum plantation sets:
There was no question as to what the town should look like or how it should be
dressed. I doubt if there was a man on that work crew who hadn’t been out with a
‘Tom’ show […] Stage crews had been constructing Tom shows for so long that
there wasn’t a detail of the Civil War period, inside or out, that they hadn’t built.
(qtd. in Williams 97)
In fact, according to Brown, the men constructing the set included hinges on the scenery
so that it could be easily packed up and transported, even though it was only being used
for the film. This account makes it clear that, for example, in the scene where the happy
slaves entertain Ben and his friends with a dance outside the slave quarters during their
two-hour lunch break, Griffith is drawing his inspiration, not from history, or even from
images originated by Dixon’s novel, but from long-standing cultural depictions of slave
life. In fact, it is not at all clear from The Clansman whether Dixon would have agreed
with Griffith’s glorification of slavery, particularly given his outspoken condemnation of
it elsewhere. A much clearer example of disagreement between Dixon’s and Griffith’s
depictions of the South appears in the character of Ben Cameron. In the film, Ben is the
very image of a southern Cavalier, idle and aristocratic. In the novel, he scoffs at this
stereotype: “Cavalier fiddlesticks. There are no Cavaliers in my country. We are all
Covenanter and Huguenot folks. The idea that Southern boys are lazy loafing dreamers
is a myth” (Dixon 129). These subtleties, while not affecting the larger point of the
narrative, reveal the context in which such elements rose to the surface of Griffith’s
milieu.
In addition to bringing the narrative in line with audience expectations, Griffith’s
modifications to the characters and their relationships further strengthen his theme of
white brotherhood, and heighten the emotional intensity of its violation. Having
27
established the friendship between the Cameron and Stoneman siblings, Griffith has the
younger brothers of both families meet on the battlefield, and die in each others’ arms. A
few scenes later, when Elsie and Ben meet in a northern hospital where Ben lies wounded
(the scene that begins the novel), the significance of the encounter is heightened by their
mutual relationship with Phil, who commends his wounded friend to the care of his sister
in a letter. Ben, for his part, has carried Elsie’s picture, taken from Phil, with him
throughout the war. Their romance flourishes almost instantly. In the book, by contrast,
this development is delayed not only by the fact that the two are strangers to each other,
but because Ben already has a sweetheart back home: Marion Lenoir (who, we gather,
was only 10 years old when Ben departed for the war). Ben eventually realizes that he
cares for Elsie instead, and Marion, now 15, steps aside (although she still loves him).
However, she is later raped by Gus and commits suicide alongside her mother in order to
conceal the blight upon her virtue. Griffith simplifies this love triangle by transforming
Marion into Ben’s “pet” sister, Flora, without changing the essential dynamics of their
relationship or its effect on the story. If anything, the change causes Flora’s suicide to
carry more weight for the audience than it does in the novel.
The climax of both stories is much the same, although the film significantly raises
the stakes of the rescue by the Klan, dividing the danger among multiple protagonists and
placing the black population fully in control of the town while the white families cower
in their homes. The film also carries the story well beyond the conclusion of the novel,
following through with the implied victory of the Klan in regaining political power in the
South. Finally, regional reconciliation is symbolically achieved with a double wedding.
Ben Cameron marries Elsie Stoneman, Phil Stoneman marries Margaret Cameron, and
28
the couples share a honeymoon by the sea, where they imagine a utopian world without
war, where white Americans live together in harmony and peace, “one and inseparable,
now and forever.” The Clansman ends on a note of relief that white civilization has been
successfully saved from black tyranny, and more specifically, with “the South redeemed
from shame” (374). The Birth of a Nation “sacrificed blacks to the nationalist cause,”
following through on the reunification of North and South with the defeat and expulsion
of the black race (Kirby 7). This shift in emphasis was presumably what led Dixon to
suggest changing the film’s title to The Birth of a Nation after he attended the first
screening. The film, much more than the novel, represents the “interlacing of Southern
and national politics” (Müller-Hartman 54). Dixon’s racist rhetoric is rewritten to appeal
to the entire nation, in part through Griffith’s introduction of mythic elements into
Dixon’s narrative framework, without changing the fundamentals of his political
message. The result was a resounding success, both critically and financially, and
something of a cultural watershed. The film’s popularity is considered a significant
factor in the major revival of the Ku Klux Klan, which began around the time of its
release, and Griffith is generally credited with the national recognition of film as a
serious art form. Thus, “American movies were born […] in a racist epic” (Rogin qtd. in
Williams 100). Furthermore, John Hope Franklin, writing in 1979, judged that “the
influence of ‘Birth of a Nation’ on the current view of Reconstruction has been greater
than any other single force” (52). Dixon and Griffith, to paraphrase Woodrow Wilson’s
famous reaction to their film, had rewritten history with lightning, and now “rode a
historiographical and political juggernaut which swept all before it” (Kirby 6).
29
All, that is, except for one particularly important demographic. African
Americans, represented by the newly formed NAACP, rose up in loud protest against the
film, battling its release in every city where it threatened to appear. The outcry they
produced was so great that it forced President Wilson to retract his former praise of the
film, and they succeeded in getting the film censored in several locations. The
organization’s crusade against The Birth of a Nation became something of a cause
célèbre, and they continued to oppose it through several re-releases for decades. Most
importantly with respect to future films, these protests managed to brand Griffith as a
racist, a label he deeply resented. Stereotypical depictions of African Americans
continued, but films about either the Reconstruction period or the Ku Klux Klan
remained practically nonexistent until the release of Gone with the Wind in 1939; a
powerful statement, considering the financial success of The Birth of a Nation and the
formula-repetition business model of the film industry. Perhaps it simply made more
sense to focus on the happier days of antebellum life rather than court controversy by
depicting the downfall of the Confederate South. By the time “talkies” arrived and the
Great Depression had begun, audiences were clamoring for two things: opulent musicals
and uplifting stories with happy endings. The Old South, populated with bright,
beautifully dressed belles, gallant gentlemen, and comical, singing slaves, promised them
just that. So, for instance, Bing Crosby croons his way from town to town via riverboat
in Mississippi (1935), and an all-slave choir serenades Bette Davis’ catty southern belle
in Jezebel (1938).
Meanwhile, southern plantation fiction and its attendant mythology, which had
continued to appear steadily alongside the stark new face of southern literature
30
exemplified by authors like William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell, exploded once more
with the 1936 release of Margaret Mitchell’s exhaustive “encyclopedia of the plantation
legend” (Cowley qtd. in O’Brien 153). That, at least, was how one reviewer labeled
Gone with the Wind upon its release, and this view characterizes a significant portion of
scholarly opinion. For many critics, the novel and the film epitomize everything that is
hackneyed and ridiculous about the popular image of the South. They are correct
inasmuch as Mitchell’s conventions are inescapably a product of the plantation romance
tradition; but (as some have pointed out) it would be a mistake to assume that this
understanding of the novel’s meaning is complete. Mitchell makes her debt to earlier
authors clear in a 1936 letter replying to Thomas Dixon’s praise of her work. She writes,
“I was practically raised on your books, and love them very much,” recounting how, as a
young girl, she adapted Dixon’s novel The Traitor (a sequel to The Clansman) into a play
performed with the neighborhood children (52-53). However, what Dixon, and much of
Mitchell’s audience, seems to have missed is that she has told Dixon’s story, but
produced something radically different.
The contrast between Mitchell and Dixon (et al.) is most apparent with regards to
race, and in the treatment of interracial rape that appears in both novels, as explored at
some length by Kenneth O’Brien. This departure includes Mitchell’s extended
description of Reconstruction and of the Ku Klux Klan, which represents a digression of
several pages of pure exposition. This portion of the novel manages to include every
stock description of the period one might expect to encounter in Dixon’s fictionalization
of Dunning School historiography: “Now” we are told, “[Scarlett] knew what
Reconstruction meant […] as surely as if the house were ringed about by naked savages”
31
(429). Here in Mitchell’s novel, as in Dixon’s and in countless other novels and histories,
are “the former field hands” who find “themselves suddenly elevated to the seats of the
mighty” where “they conducted themselves as creatures of small intelligence might
naturally be expected to do,” while the “better class of them, scorning freedom, were
suffering as severely as their white masters.” Here, too, is a Ku Klux Klan that arises out
of a “tragic necessity” and in response to “the large number of outrages on women and
the ever-present fear for the safety of their wives and daughters” (434, 435). However, as
O’Brien points out, the rote manner in which Mitchell trots out these well-worn clichés is
indicative of her departure from convention: “Race relations—inseparable from the
earlier novels—are largely background material for Mitchell. […] Thus, in the sections
on Reconstruction, politics and racial affairs are not at all integrated into the narrative but
exist as long descriptive passages […] backdrop against which Mitchell projects Scarlett
O’Hara’s story” (163).
Unsurprisingly, Scarlett’s story also includes an instance of sexual assault, but the
episode does not at all resemble the parallel scene as imagined by Dixon or Griffith.
There, the Marion/Flora character is assaulted by Gus, a well-established character, who
attacks the girl alone in the film, and with a gang of black friends in the novel. His crime
is motivated entirely by lust for a girl that he already knows, which has been provoked by
disruptions of the social order that have placed him in a position of power. In Gone with
the Wind, Scarlett’s attackers include both a black man and a white man from the
shantytown she is driving past. They are nameless strangers, motivated initially by a
desire to rob her, and she is rescued from the attack by the intervention of Big Sam, a
black man and a former field hand who (in a Dixon novel) might well have been the
32
perpetrator rather than the savior. Even more significantly, Scarlett as victim is accused
by India of being at fault for what happened through her continued insistence in defying
gender-based restrictions of good breeding and good sense by driving herself through
dangerous areas as she conducts her business: “What happened to you this afternoon was
just what you deserved and if there was any justice you’d have gotten worse” (529). In
this scene, Scarlett learns for the first time that her husband is a member of the Ku Klux
Klan (of which, in contrast to Mitchell’s own narrative voice, she does not approve), and
that they have gone out to avenge her honor and clean out the slum from which her
attackers emerged. The significance of this Klan adventure is simply as a plot device to
propel the story on to its next development by causing the death of Scarlett’s second
husband, Frank Kennedy, and allowing Rhett Butler an opportunity to win back the
respect of the local southerners when he steps in to cover for the surviving Klan
members, thus opening the way for Scarlett to finally marry him. This is a major
departure from The Clansman, in which the doings of the Klan are the narrative center
around which everything else revolves.
Another obvious difference between Mitchell and Dixon, and a major source of
the novel’s continued popularity, is in the nature of Scarlett’s character. Her ongoing
“struggle […] against the confines of Southern womanhood” (O’Brien 163) has led some
critics to view Gone with the Wind as a feminist text, albeit a complicated one. Mitchell
certainly uses the restrictions of gender to call the southern ideal into question, noting
early on that “at no time, before or since, had so low a premium been placed on feminine
naturalness” (54). This criticism could almost be a description of Thomas Dixon’s
depiction of female characters in his novels. When Ben Cameron first begins to woo
33
Elsie Stoneman in The Clansman, she is a budding proto-feminist, determined to live her
own life: “I deny your heaven-born male kingship. […] I have a personality of my own.
You and your kind assume the right to absorb all lesser lights.” To which Ben replies,
“Certainly; I’m a man,” laughing openly at her dreams “of a life that shall be larger than
the four walls of a home” (127). Later on, however, Elsie declares that, “When I first met
you […] I was a vain, self-willed, pert little thing […] Now […] I have grown into an
impassioned, serious, self-disciplined, bewildered woman” (333). With southern
patriarchy “under attack from the growing movement for female emancipation” (MüllerHartmann 57), Dixon envisions female submission as a happy side-effect of black
suppression. In addition, in the omnipresent threat of black rape envisioned by Dixon,
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall sees “a fantasy of aggression against boundary-transgressing
women” (qtd. in Müller-Hartmann 58). Scarlett flips this movement from independence
to submission on its head, growing increasingly impatient with the restraints placed upon
her, and actively finding ways to behave as she likes by gaming the social system under
which she is forced to operate, frequently through collusion with Rhett, her male double
and future lover.
Scarlett is consistently contrasted with her binary opposite, Melanie Wilkes, just
as Rhett contrasts with Melanie’s cousin/husband Ashley. Melanie represents the ideal of
southern femininity: courageous, unselfish, unquestioningly devoted to her family and
her region, and virtuous to a fault. Mitchell presents Melanie, the ideal, as a character to
be admired and respected. However, Mitchell undermines what Melanie represents at
every turn. Although Melanie is the perfect image of southern womanhood, she is also
almost a complete anomaly in the novel. Other southern women are catty (India Wilkes),
34
judgmental (Mrs. Mead), weak (Aunt Pittypat), and whiny (Suellen O’Hara), and those
are just the upstanding southern women. Other prominent female characters include the
promiscuous, ill-bred Emmie Slattery and the wealthy Atlanta prostitute Belle Watling
(who frequently reveals greater strength of character than most of the other women). As
for Melanie herself, despite her appeal as a character, she is presented as blindly naïve
and physically weak. In contrast with Scarlett’s strength and fertility in bearing a child to
each of her three husbands and surviving a terrible fall which kills a fourth baby in the
womb, Melanie ultimately dies as the result of a miscarriage. Mitchell, then, insists that
southern womanhood is effectively a myth that does not exist in reality, and could not
survive or reproduce if it did. Scarlett, on the other hand, shares a deeply symbolic
connection with the vibrant, youthful city of Atlanta, which (we are told) was founded in
the year of Scarlett’s birth. Scarlett finds the city appealing because, “Like herself, the
town was a mixture of the old and new in Georgia, in which the old often came off
second best in its conflicts with the self-willed and vigorous new” (94).
This privileging of the new over the old is the key to Scarlett’s success, and to her
superiority. Shortly after Scarlett vows to do whatever she must in order to never
experience hunger again, Mitchell describes the significance of what sets Scarlett apart:
“Throughout the South for fifty years there would be bitter-eyed women who looked
backward, to dead times, to dead men, evoking memories that hurt and were futile,
bearing poverty with bitter pride because they had those memories. But Scarlett was
never to look back” (Mitchell 283). Throughout the novel, Scarlett overcomes tragedy,
heartbreak, and disappointment by putting them out of her mind; “I’ll think about that
tomorrow.” Her attitude represents a sort of denial, but more importantly, it indicates a
35
refusal to dwell continually on the past which Mitchell sees as both destructive and as
representative of prevailing southern attitudes. However, Mitchell also envisions a
different, but equally problematic, form of self-deception, as Scarlett finally discovers at
the end of the novel. Melanie’s death moves her to self-reflection, leading to a series of
startling epiphanies. She realizes that Melanie, whom she has always hated for her silly
idealism and for standing in the way of Scarlett’s love for Ashley, has been the only
genuine female friend she ever had, and a source of strength for her throughout her life.
More importantly, she realizes, just too late, that her love for Ashley, the representative
of chivalrous, well-bred southern masculinity, has been terribly misplaced. Ashley, like
his wife, is weak, and even cowardly, lacking the courage to tell her that he can never
love her as he loves Melanie, thus preventing her from moving on to find happiness with
someone else. This realization provides her with a rare moment of insight into Ashley’s
character, and her own:
He never really existed at all, except in my imagination [...] I loved something I
made up, something that's just as dead as Melly is. I made a pretty suit of clothes
and fell in love with it. And when Ashley came riding along, so handsome, so
different, I put that suit on him and made him wear it whether it fitted him or not.
And I wouldn't see what he really was. I kept on loving the pretty clothes—and
not him at all. (Mitchell 675)
Ashley has filled an important role in Scarlett’s fantasy life, but in doing so he has
prevented her from finding fulfillment in reality. This realization, arriving in the final
pages of the novel before Scarlett rushes to declare her love to Rhett (he abandons her
anyway), fully reveals Mitchell’s attempt to refute the southern myth from within in
Gone with the Wind.
Like Scarlett, Margaret Mitchell’s fellow southerners have dressed the Old South
in “a pretty suit of clothes” of their own imaging, and have refused to see the region for
36
what it “really was.” Southerners, Mitchell warns, must free themselves of this illusion
before it is too late for them, as it may be for Scarlett by the novel’s end, which finds
Rhett escaping in search of respectability, and Scarlett returning to the comforts of Tara.
Unfortunately, in the novel’s conclusion as elsewhere, Mitchell fails to “create a pointed
and consistent reworking of the Southern tradition. In too many ways, she relied on that
tradition and escaped confronting its implications” (O’Brien 165). Like a rocket intended
for space travel, but unable to break free of Earth’s gravitational pull, Gone with the Wind
cannot quite transcend its genre trappings. Still, the novel clearly retains more than
sufficient nuance and ambiguity to lead perceptive readers to question the historical myth
that it recreates so completely. However, as Jack Kirby points out, “Novel readers and
moviegoers may, but probably do not, thoughtfully contemplate the use of stereotypes.
They are entertained and go on their way, never tidily segregating history from vivid
written and/or pictorial imagery” (72). This is especially true of the film adaptation of
Gone with the Wind, a process which presents an interesting comparison with the
adaptation of The Clansman a quarter of a century before.
Hollywood producer David O. Selznick, famous for the complete control he often
exercised over his film projects, purchased the rights to Gone with the Wind shortly
before it was published, but complications and Selznick’s commitment to perfection
(particularly in light of the book’s immense popularity) delayed the start of production
for over two years. One of the chief difficulties (among many) lay in translating
Mitchell’s instantly beloved and enormous tome into a screenplay that was sufficiently
brief while preserving everything that audiences expected to see after reading the novel.
Presumably Selznick could only achieve one of these goals, for the final cut of the film
37
runs to nearly four hours, longer even than the abnormally protracted Birth of a Nation.
A note from Selznick to his screenwriter reveals much about how he viewed the process:
“One never knows what chemicals have gone to make up something that has appealed to
millions of people, or how many seeming faults of construction have been part of the
whole, and how much the balance would be offset by making changes [. . .] in our
innocence, or even in our ability” (qtd. in Leff 107). Nevertheless, at over a thousand
pages in length, even four hours would prove woefully insufficient to include every
character and incident from the novel. Some things would simply have to go, and given
Selznick’s overpowering vision and recognition of his audience, it should come as no
surprise that the version which emerged from Mitchell’s source reflects those parts of the
novel which conform most closely to well-established southern myths. Without adding
significantly to her narrative, Selznick “purged Gone with the Wind of Mitchell's
ambiguity” about the South (Wood 131). So, for example, in contrast with the elaborate
metaphor Scarlett pictures in connection with her destructive love of Ashley Wilkes, in
the film she simply murmurs, “I've loved something that doesn't really exist, but
somehow, I don’t care. Somehow, it doesn’t matter.” In addition to eliminating Mitchell’s
questioning of the constructed nature of southern identity, the dismissive “it doesn’t
matter” directly contradicts Scarlett’s annoyance and regret in the novel: “What a fool
I’ve been […] And now I’ve got to pay for it. […] I’ve got him round my neck for the
rest of my life” (676). Even though she has finally understood the artificiality of her
image of Ashley, he will remain a burden to her.
Furthermore, much like D.W. Griffith had done with The Clansman, Selznick
imbued Mitchell’s story with a glorification of a romanticized past which simply wasn’t
38
there before. Selznick’s “nostalgia contrasts sharply […] with Mitchell's ambivalent
vision” (Wood 131), a development which is clear from the opening titles of the film.
The film begins with a shot of slaves hoeing a field of cotton, and the words “Margaret
Mitchell’s Story of the Old South.” As the credits announce the cast, crew, and
characters, we see a series of images of slaves picking cotton, of blossoming trees, of the
Mississippi River, and of other things clearly selected to evoke the South. Finally, before
continuing with the scene which begins the novel, there is a series of shots showing
slaves returning home at sunset as a choir hums along with a slow, instrumental rendition
of “Dixie” and a brief prologue crawls upwards across the screen:
There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South . . .
Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be
seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave . . .
Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A
Civilization gone with the wind . . .
This introduces the entire myth of the Old South in brief, and has a great deal more in
common with Dixon’s style of writing than with Mitchell’s, but above all it is
reminiscent of Griffith’s ability to appeal to audience expectations, and sets the tone for
Selznick’s version of the story. Like Griffith’s, Selznick’s attention to historical minutiae
was painstaking, but lacked any solid sense of overriding historical truth: “The problem
[...] was that the studio's obsession with detail extended only so far. Whether or not oral
thermometers could be used for the hospital scene had to be carefully verified, but
Selznick's sweeping conception of the Old South was accepted without question”
(Campbell 125).
As African Americans began to voice criticisms of Mitchell’s novel, however,
Selznick grew wary of suffering Griffith’s fate. Pressure both from outside groups and
from the black actors working on the film led Selznick to reluctantly eliminate the word
39
“nigger” from the script, first the instances of its use by whites, then of its use by blacks
as well. Much easier to cut were any overt references to the Ku Klux Klan; as Selznick
explained, “A group of men can go out to ‘get’ the perpetrators of an attempted rape
without having long white sheets over them” (qtd. in Leff 107-108). Many of the people
who had expressed concerns appeared satisfied with Selznick’s removal of overt
negativity toward black characters in the film. Nevertheless, the black characters are a
source of comedy in the film in a way that they simply aren’t in the novel. For instance,
in one completely new (and quite purposeless) scene, Uncle Peter unsuccessfully stalks a
rooster, all the while begging it (in his exaggerated dialect) to cooperate so that he can
serve it for dinner. Even the scenes of Atlanta in the midst of Reconstruction take on a
slightly comical tone. As Scarlett walks by a white man standing above a group of black
men, she hears him declare, “We’re going to give all of you 40 acres and a mule!” To
which one listener replies with an immensely exaggerated, “And a mule? Gee!” And, in a
scene which could have been transplanted directly from The Birth of a Nation, Mammy
shoos a group of black men blocking Scarlett’s path with a wave of her umbrella and an
angry, “Get out of the way, trash!” Other unpleasant stereotypes emerged as well.
Butterfly McQueen has received harsh criticism for her portrayal of Scarlett’s shiftless
maid Prissy, who complains loudly about everything and comes across as cowardly and
extremely foolish. In the novel, however, Prissy is only a little girl behaving in character
for her age, not a full-grown woman being infantilized.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese believes that what Gone with the Wind accomplishes
(similar to the purpose previously described with respect to The Birth of a Nation) is to
transform “a particular regional past into a generalized national past.” However, where
40
Griffith’s film accomplishes this by repeatedly emphasizing the brotherhood between
white men of the North and white men of the South, Fox-Genovese describes how
Mitchell’s South, even before the war, is “infused with the blood of Irish immigrants”
(398). These include Scarlett’s father Gerald, whose rise from penniless fugitive to
wealthy planter is briefly chronicled in the novel, though his origins are only slightly
alluded to in the film (his thick brogue does all the work). In direct contrast with the rest
of the southern aristocracy, Gerald is a self-made man who exemplifies the American
dream. Through the character of Gerald, Selznick captures the agrarian spirit of the novel
and increases it several-fold. Gerald’s passionate declaration early on in the novel that
“Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything […] the only thing worth
working for, worth fighting for—worth dying for” (23) is repeated and reinforced
throughout both novel and film, as Scarlett struggles to hold onto Tara. However, where
the novel ends with Scarlett continuing to draw strength from her personal mantra (“I’ll
think of it all tomorrow”), the film shifts the emphasis considerably. After Rhett departs,
Scarlett collapses onto the staircase and sobs, but a chorus of voices intrudes upon her
thoughts, including her father, Ashley, and Rhett repeating lines heard earlier in the film.
Her father reminds her of the importance of land, Ashley informs her again that she loves
Tara even more than him, and Rhett identifies “the red earth of Tara” as the source of her
strength. The voices build to a crescendo, finally repeating “Tara! Tara! Tara!” as
Scarlett experiences another epiphany and realizes that she must return home, to Tara and
the land and all of the conflicting ideas that they represent. As Wood insightfully
observes regarding the contrast between the two influential southern film epics, “while
41
Birth of a Nation would have an insufficient past serve a glorious future, Gone with the
Wind offers the past as a refuge from a hopeless present” (134).
Kirby declares that “Gone with the Wind was another generation's Birth of a
Nation, although apparently a far greater proportion of the population was entertained,
educated, reinforced in their southern imagery by GWTW” (72). In the final judgment, a
film’s effect on its audience often carries the greatest weight, and whatever else it
communicated, Selznick’s troubling southern masterpiece, like Griffith’s before it,
resoundingly confirmed audience assumptions about the South and its history. So, too,
did The Clansman and Margaret Mitchell’s novel, but the latter represents a clear
departure from the romantic tradition as its author intended, while the former remains too
concerned with its strident regional polemics to achieve a national audience. Only the
film versions, constrained by apparently inescapable, and perhaps even unconscious,
conformity to southern mores, bring the full weight of the southern myth to bear on an
audience caught in an echo chamber of self-perpetuating expectations. Nevertheless,
despite its popularity, influence, and staying power, Gone with the Wind’s understanding
of southern regional identity represents the climactic apotheosis of essentially positivistic
cultural approaches to the region. Slowly but surely, a cultural backlash was building
that would ultimately replace the cultural dominance of romantic depictions of the South
with its darker, gothic cousin.
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CHAPTER THREE
City Monster, Country Monster: Southern Horror and the Adaptation of Deliverance
Although the first few generations of American films had portrayed the
antebellum South as an Edenic paradise, later film audiences would learn that Dixie is in
fact a very scary place. This idea is one of the dominant cultural metanarratives about the
American South, with origins nearly as old as southern regional identity and a currency
that remains firmly entrenched today. Existing in the popular imagination as an
unregenerate region terrorized by ghosts of the past and monsters of the present, its
inhabitants characterized by every conceivable form of degradation, it is not to be toured
lightly. Visitors who venture across the Mason-Dixon Line soon learn that the renowned
warmth of southern hospitality is a thin veneer, beneath which beats the heart of
American darkness in the form of violence, racism, sexual repression, sexual perversion,
ignorance, superstition, genetic deficiency, and any number of buried secrets best left
undisturbed. Anyone familiar with American literature or film is aware that this
perception has proven extraordinarily popular as a source of fiction, but may not
understand why. According to Teresa Goddu:
The South’s oppositional image—its gothic excesses and social transgressions—
has served as the nation’s safety valve: as the repository for everything the nation
is not, the South purges contrary impulses. […] the imaginary South functions as
the nation’s “dark” other. By so closely associating the gothic with the South, the
American literary tradition neutralizes the gothic’s threat to national identity. As
merely a regional strategy, the gothic’s horrifying haunting […] can be contained.
(76)
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As Robin Wood explains, the concept of otherness (here applied to the South) functions
both as “something external […] to the self” and “what is repressed […] in the self and
projected outward in order to be hated and destroyed.” This is, for Wood, the true subject
of horror: the emergence of the repressed other as something monstrous (27-28). It is
unsurprising, then, that for over two centuries, southern gothic horror has consistently
depicted "the collective unconscious of the American experience, the nightmares, fears,
monsters and demonic anti-myths of American life that lurk below the optimism and
confidence that have characterized our culture" (Frank ix). One of the most significant
examples of this tradition is the 1972 adaptation of James Dickey’s novel Deliverance, a
film that both influenced the horror genre and came to represent southern abjection in the
national consciousness. A brief exploration of the development of southern horror, and
an analysis of Deliverance, will reveal the cultural mechanism behind the othering of the
South as the result of a confluence between the growth of particular regional stereotypes
and a much older genre tradition.
According to Rick Worland, gothic literature is one of the foundational traditions
of modern horror, but arriving at a precise definition of “gothic” remains notoriously
contentious. Just as “horror movies were not indigenous to the American screen” during
the early years of cinema, gothic literature was first shaped elsewhere (Clarens 37). The
form emerged in eighteenth-century England (originating with The Castle of Otranto in
1764), during “a time of change, upheaval, and uncertainty” (Worland 28). Usually set in
decaying mansions or castles, its superficial elements also include characters who
encounter frightening and mysterious supernatural occurrences. After a few decades,
when gothic literature began to appear in America, American authors faced certain
44
challenges in making the genre their own. First of all, of course, there is a decided lack
of aging castles on this side of the Atlantic. On a more fundamental level, though, gothic
literature requires a national history, a dark past that becomes terrifyingly embodied
within the narrative so that it can be confronted by the characters. To many observers,
the United States, which was being formed alongside the appearance of the gothic in
England, seemed to have no past from which to draw. Some American authors simply
transplanted European castles onto American soil, while others initially looked to the
Indian as a source of gothic horror. However, other voices were developing the gothic in
a different direction. Frederick Frank observes that where “the English Gothic had dealt
with physical terror and social horror, the American Gothic would concentrate on mental
terror and moral horror” (xii).
America’s seeming innocence had in fact already been compromised in its
infancy by the evils of slavery; evils powerful enough to feed the dark appetite of gothic
imagery. Goddu notes that “the rise of the gothic novel in England (1790-1830) occurred
during a period of increased debate over [slavery …] The terror of possession, the
iconography of entrapment and imprisonment, and the familial transgressions found in
the gothic novel were also present in the slave system” (73). In America, too, the
blackness of slavery connects with the “blackness” of gothic literature, lurking just
beneath the surface of the nation’s literary tradition:
American gothic literature criticizes America’s national myth of new-world
innocence by voicing the cultural contradictions that undermine the nation’s claim
to purity and equality […] the gothic tells of historical horrors that make national
identity possible yet must be repressed in order to sustain it. (10)
American cultural voices were quick to locate these contradictions within the South. As
early as 1782, in Letters from an American Farmer, Goddu finds St. John de Crèvecouer
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making use of gothic language to describe his encounter with the South’s “peculiar
institution,” disrupting an otherwise glowingly idealized portrait of early American
culture with “slavery’s abject presence” (13). By the 1830s, the South had developed a
“minority psychology,” and had become both a distinctive region apart and a national
problem, with slavery as the catalyzing force (though by no means the only one). Instead
of dying out, as some early southern leaders had hoped, slavery had become the context
for the southern version of the American dream, and a major source of tension (Wilson
586-587). Amidst this growing turmoil arose one of the major gothic voices of American
literature: Edgar Allen Poe. In 1940, Richard Wright proclaimed that “we have in the
oppression of the Negro a shadow athwart our national life dense and heavy […] if Poe
were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him” (462). Given
the historic connection between gothic literature and social turbulence, perhaps horror
truly did invent Poe instead of the other way around. In any case, it is ultimately through
Poe “that the South and the gothic become inextricably linked” (Goddu 76). Later
critical readings repeatedly tie his work to racial symbolism, while the southern literary
tradition claims him by virtue of his southern heritage and his enormous influence on the
writers of the 20th century Southern Renaissance.
The South’s problematic regional identity only grew more pronounced following
the Civil War, in ways too numerous to detail thoroughly here. Historian C. Vann
Woodward suggests that the “irony” of postwar southern history is that “the South had
undergone an experience that it could share with no other part of America […] the
experience of military defeat, occupation, and reconstruction” (190). Just as the history
of slavery undermines the myth of American innocence, the history of the Confederacy
46
undermines the “American legend of success and victory” (188). Meanwhile, issues
surrounding race continued unabated and racial violence frequently spiraled out of
control. As the region continued to resist change, in contrast to the rest of the nation (i.e.,
industrialization and social reform in the North, rapid expansion and development in the
West), its inhabitants came to be regarded as singularly backward in their ways. Each
passing generation discovered new vices to ascribe to the southern states. In 1920, H.L.
Mencken created a sensation (and a lasting image of the South as “benighted”) with his
hyperbolic “The Sahara of the Bozart,” “arguably the most famous and influential single
essay ever written about the American South” (Flora 754). Mencken described the South
as an intellectual and cultural wasteland, controlled by charlatans and white trash, in
every respect uneducated and unrefined. In 1938, President Roosevelt famously stated
his conviction (based on a government report) “that the South presents right now the
Nation’s No. 1 economic problem. The Nation’s problem, not merely the South’s. For we
have an economic unbalance in the Nation as a whole, due to this very condition of the
South” (qtd. in Snavely 406). The South would take center-stage as the nation’s number
one problem again throughout the 1960s thanks to its staunch opposition to desegregation
and the Civil Rights Movement.
By the 1930s, there could be absolutely no doubt that the South had enough of a
past to sustain what Cathy Davidson calls “the Gothic’s generic challenge to history, its
rewriting and unwriting of history” (qtd. in Goddu 9). The region even had a few
decaying castles (or at least reasonable approximations). Major writers of the Southern
Renaissance were quick to adopt the gothic form as a means for taking a hard look at
their native land. Chief among these was William Faulkner, whose 1936 novel Absalom,
47
Absalom! constructs a setting reminiscent of Poe to tell the sweeping story of a southern
family’s slow disintegration during the period surrounding the Civil War. The novel
features themes of miscegenation, incest, homosexuality, and murder, reaching deep into
the troubled past to explore the South’s destructive failure to reconcile its black children
with its white children. By 1960, use of the gothic was universally recognized as the
predominant mode of southern literature.
By contrast, the American film industry had spent its first three decades
“producing romantic, sentimental and nostalgic images of the South.” It wasn’t until the
1940s that Hollywood finally caught up, and “the studios began to shift to the Southern
gothic […] using the […] scripts developed by leaders of the Southern literary
renaissance in the preceding two decades” (Langman 109). It soon became clear that the
South was the ideal American setting for horror. In 1943, Universal Pictures released
Son of Dracula, the second sequel to the popular Dracula (1931). In the movie, the first
of the series (and the first vampire film) to be set in America, Dracula’s son works his
wiles on a wealthy southern belle at her family’s plantation. 1943 also saw the release of
Revenge of the Zombies. Featuring the first appearance of zombies on American soil, it
too is set on a southern plantation. Meanwhile, Tennessee Williams would soon become
the most prominent source of gothic depictions of the South, both on the stage and on
film. After achieving success as a playwright during the late 1940s, Williams began
adapting his plays for the screen in 1950. Portraying a fallen southern aristocracy
typified by madness and aberrant sexuality, his characters grew increasingly grotesque
throughout the decade, culminating at last in the “sheer gothic horror” of Suddenly, Last
Summer in 1959 (Kirby 94). In the film, a southern matriarch plots to have her niece
48
lobotomized in order to preserve the reputation of her predatory, homosexual son after he
is literally devoured by a group of boys in a Spanish village. At the film’s climax, a
friendly psychologist helps the niece recall the full terror of what she has witnessed in a
lengthy, gruesome flashback. The fallen aristocracy vogue continued into the 1960s with
Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964). In search of a follow-up to the successful formula
of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), producer/director Robert Aldrich settled
on a contemporary story about the madness of a faded southern belle (played by Bette
Davis) in a crumbling southern plantation. The film begins with a startlingly graphic
sequence set in the 1920s, in which the then-young Charlotte’s beau is brutally hacked to
death with a meat cleaver, before settling into a more conventionally gothic haunted
house story. The presence of graphic violence and gore was certainly on the rise by this
point, as evidenced by another film released that same year: Two Thousand Maniacs. In
contrast with the black-and-white restraint of Suddenly, Last Summer and Hush…Hush,
Sweet Charlotte, Two Thousand Maniacs was filmed “in lurid color with blood spurting
and viscera flopping” (Worland 90). It is also an early example of an often-repeated
horror formula imposed on the southern setting: A “normal” group of outsiders face the
terrifying emergence of the repressed in their southern brethren; in this case, the South
makes good on promises to “rise again” in search of retribution. Described as “a bloody
Brigadoon,” the film features crazed inhabitants of a small southern town who exact a
ghastly revenge on a group of northern travelers who unluckily stray into a centennial
celebration of the town’s destruction during the Civil War. Released just months before
the murder of three Civil Rights activists in Mississippi during “Freedom Summer,” the
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film seems remarkably prescient in its depiction of “America’s repellent yet all too
compelling Other” (Graham 335).
By this point, southern horror clearly existed as a subgenre of American horror
film. However, most filmic portrayals of the South during this period do not belong to
the horror genre. Many possess strong elements of horror, such as the cannibalism
episode in Suddenly, Last Summer, or Max Cady’s threat to rape and murder a little girl
in Cape Fear, but belong more clearly to other genres. The former is more appropriately
categorized as a drama, with its focus on developing the characters’ relationships and
internal struggles through dialogue, with overtones of mystery as psychologist Dr.
Cukrowicz investigates the real cause of Catherine Holly’s seeming insanity. The latter
is better classified as a thriller, featuring a story that builds tension and suspense slowly
towards the inevitable, cathartic climax. Nevertheless, common themes of southern films
often include what Wood would classify as the emergence of the repressed, particularly
under the heading of two of the categories of “otherness” he defines: other cultures and
deviations from ideological sexual norms (28). While, say, the films of Tennessee
Williams are not horror films, many of them could be discussed in terms borrowed from
horror genre studies. They frequently deal with a basically human breakdown of surplus
repression within a context of southern decadence and degeneracy. If not horror, this use
of the gothic is at least frequently horrifying in its physical embodiment of repression.
Meanwhile, though, a significant transformation was transpiring in
representations of the gothic mode of southern horror, shifting the focus away from
baroque invocations of a dark racial past and a fallen aristocracy that had begun with Poe
and his predecessors. In 1972, the film version of Deliverance, destined to become an
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archetype of the genre, marked a major point of change in the new emphasis of southern
horror. As Allison Graham explains, “The phantoms who rise from the Georgia woods
[…] in Deliverance are just as evocative of the past […], only here it is the rural past”
(23). In the 1991 remake of Cape Fear, Max Cady tells one of his victims:
You’re scared. But that’s O.K. I want you to savor that fear. The South was born
in fear. Fear of the Indian, fear of the slave, fear of the damn Union. The South
has a fine tradition of savoring fear. (qtd. in Langman 176)
By implication, Cady adds yet another fear to that list. The cracker/redneck/hillbilly
persona has primarily been represented as a humorous figure of fun for centuries.
However, a growing cultural tradition, paralleling the identification of the South as a
problematic region, had established a darker side of the comically-innocent country
bumpkin. After all, “poor white trash,” not fallen aristocrats, was the target of
Mencken’s scathing criticism of southern backwardness at the beginning of the 1920s.
At the end of the decade, the Agrarians, while mounting a resounding defense of the
region in I’ll Take My Stand, “set the tone for the acceptance of […] the ‘redneck’
stereotype” (Carr 80). The stereotype continued to take root in the southern literature of
the 1930s, from Erskine Caldwell’s grotesque, vicious Lester clan to Faulkner’s lawless,
opportunistic Snopeses. By the 1960s, southern films were presenting “the redneck
reconstructed as irredeemable villain” (Graham 146), with one notable example being the
character of the murderous, degenerate Bob Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird. Two earlier
film adaptations highlight the shift in southern horror from haunted house to redneck
monster: The Night of the Hunter (1955) and the original Cape Fear (1962).
The Night of the Hunter, adapted by James Agee from a 1953 novel by Davis
Grubb, is about two children pursued by Harry Powell, a murderous revival preacher,
across a stark, Depression-era landscape. Cape Fear, adapted from James D.
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MacDonald’s 1957 novel The Executioners, features a North Carolina lawyer and his
family tormented by ex-convict Max Cady, a “cracker from hell,” for sending him to
prison years earlier (Graham 345). Both Powell and Cady were played by Robert
Mitchum, and the two villains are similar in significant ways. Figures of incredible
menace, neither character’s origin is clear. Powell is a smooth-talking serial killer who
preys on rich widows, and may or may not believe that he is acting upon orders from the
Almighty. Cady is brutish but diabolically clever, and has recently sold the family farm
in order to devote himself to revenge. What little we know of both men hints at a humble
(and, in the case of Cady, country) background. The threat they represent is of a force
from outside of civilized society; and society portrayed distinctively in Cape Fear as
urban society. Both men are men of violence, particularly violence directed at women
and children. However, Powell’s violence is at least superficially religious, and stems
from extreme sexual repression; he projects his own lust onto the women who inspire it,
and lashes out at them for their sinfulness. Cady’s violence seems to stem from a hotblooded temperament unrestrained by either civil or moral law; he embraces his animallike sexuality, and derives satisfaction from violently as well as sexually assaulting the
women he desires. Together, the characters represent two distinct but complementary
faces of the volatile (and versatile) southern redneck: the deranged, pious misogynist and
the wild, lawless sexual predator.
By the time Deliverance was published in 1970, the horror genre stood ready to
harvest this “hillbilly from hell,” fully-developed and ripe for a new role as a distinctly
southern monster. Both The Night of the Hunter and Cape Fear illustrate a movement
toward depicting the disconnect between the South and the nation, not as strictly cultural
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or geographic, but as a conflict between the city and the country, between urban
civilization and rural savagery. Ironically, this dichotomy was further reinforced by
formerly positive stereotypes about the region as well. As Edward Campbell explains, in
the 1970s “the South was finally paying the price of the film mythology, and in popular
culture found itself at last hobbled by the very character it had once been anxious to label
as representative;” namely, its agrarianism (31). Whereas a few decades earlier, Scarlett
O’Hara’s attachment to the red earth of Tara had seemed like the patriotic ideal, now it
appeared backward at best. The “change, upheaval, and uncertainty” represented by the
regional shift from agrarian to industrial created a cultural space for the intrusion of the
gothic. Thus, the tension between the agricultural (or natural) past and the industrial
future is of primary importance to Deliverance, both the 1970 novel and, with even
greater emphasis, the 1972 film. Deliverance is a story of four men from the city who,
for various reasons, undertake a canoe trip down the fictional Cahulawassee River, which
is scheduled to be destroyed by a new dam. Along the way, the adventurers meet with
disaster at the hands of a pair of monstrous hillbillies and must resort to drastic measures
in order to leave the river alive. Just as some early colonial gothic novels had turned to
Native Americans, the land’s original inhabitants, as the embodiment of a dark past for
their characters to confront, so Dickey has his modern protagonists, representatives of the
encroaching industrial world, encounter the degenerate rural occupants of the land their
people have come to despoil.
Most critical readings of the adaptation have noted the simplified rendering of the
novel’s many themes, but have frequently missed this point, and so are unable to interpret
it correctly. Deliverance is basically a horror film in which the monster is the untamed
53
country and the people who inhabit it. Two analyses, by Robert Willson and James
Beaton, both proceed on the assumption that the meaning of the film is intended to be
identical to the meaning of the novel, and what’s more, identical to their particular
interpretation of the novel’s meaning. As Beaton says, “Deliverance fails […] because
Boorman’s cinematic rhetoric, aggressive where Dickey is probing, so alters the novel’s
aesthetic emphases that we experience the fiction from an awkwardly chosen vantage,”
that is, from a vantage other than Beaton’s vantage as reader (296). Finding that the film
does not communicate the entirety of their reading of the novel’s meaning, they conclude
that a failure has occurred. As a result, though their readings of the novel are welldetailed, they fail to illuminate the meaning of the film.
One of the chief difficulties in this case, as both Willson and Beaton
acknowledge, is Dickey’s use of narrative voice in the novel. The entire story is narrated
in the first person by the hero, Ed Gentry. Attempting to translate this device into
cinematic terms is tricky at best, and is rarely implemented successfully, whether through
pervasive voice-over or consistent use of point-of-view shots. However, there is a further
problem that both readings ignore. Willson makes a particular point of criticizing the
translation of Gentry’s climactic nighttime ascent of the cliff as having been “reduced” to
“a few seconds of film time” during which “there is never any doubt that Ed will make it”
(57, 52). Perhaps it is quibbling to note that the film devotes a full three minutes to this
scene (hardly insignificant for a runtime of under two hours), and that this represents an
even larger proportion of the overall story than the episode is granted in the book.
Leaving that aside, the accusation of a loss of tension between novel and film is
particularly baffling. Since the novel is presented to us from the beginning as Ed’s
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recollection of an event that happened to him many years before, it would likely never
occur to the reader to suspect that he could die. By dislodging this privileged point of
view, the film’s audience cannot know for certain what the outcome will be for Ed, as
well as for the other characters. These sorts of observations illustrate the subtleties of
audience perception that influence how a story is received across different media.
Because the novel’s cliff scene takes longer than three minutes to read and is so
intimately connected with the anguish of the climber and metaphorical significance of his
efforts, the impact of the same scene in the film seems to pale in comparison. However,
the use of dissolves in this scene effectively heightens the audience’s awareness of the
passage of time, and the focus of the climb is simply shifted from the incredible effort
involved to the more relevant importance of the end-goal once Ed has reached the top.
The tension shifts with it; instead of worrying that Ed will fall to his death, the audience
wonders what he will discover when he reaches the top of the cliff and whether he will be
able to deal with whatever challenge it presents, even if it means killing a man.
Most assessments of Deliverance seem to have little knowledge of, or interest in,
the process of adaptation beyond a point-by-point comparison of the literal differences
between novel and film. Beaton notes at one point that he has “proceeded on the
assumption that while Dickey obviously collaborated in the bastardization of his novel,
Boorman’s direction was responsible for most of what I have found to be objectionable
about the film” (297). Though crudely put, this is likely a more-or-less fair assessment.
In the afterword to the published screenplay, Dickey explains that, without a model to
follow when he was hired to adapt his own work, he simply opened the novel and “with a
camera in the hands of God rather than those of any mortal cinematographer, I wrote the
55
scenes one after the other as I would like to have them be” (154). The screenplay follows
the novel almost exactly, and consequently is significantly longer than the finished film.
Ultimately, nearly everything that is in the film is in the screenplay/novel, which implies
a deceptive sort of fidelity. Perhaps the most significant change, as Robert Armour
explains, is to “equalize the roles of the four [heroes], who are disproportionately
presented in the novel” (282). In contrast to Willson’s accusation that Dickey has
ignored characterization in the film, Armour finds that some of the characters,
particularly Bobby, are given added dimension that was previously lacking. Although Ed
is still the primary protagonist, some redistribution of dialogue and skillful performances
by the lead actors enriches the experiences undergone by all four men. Like the other
critics, Armour notices that the film has omitted “most of the material that is extraneous”
to a few particular themes, but far from diminishing the film, Armour believes that this
results in “a better understanding” of the central theme than is offered by the novel. For
Armour, the key to Deliverance is its characters’ loss of innocence. However, he is also
aware that “the appearance of the mountain people is made more grotesque in the film in
order to heighten the gap between city people and mountain folk” and to help “set the
cultural contrast between the two worlds” (284). I would suggest that, although the loss
of innocence plays a thematic role in the film, it is this contrast between the country (the
South) and the city (everywhere else) that serves as the guiding idea behind the film, and
is of equal importance in the novel.
The distinction drawn between the city and the country as the characters journey
to the river is impossible to miss in the novel, and is done in a manner that is highly
suggestive of the tradition of othering that we have seen thus far:
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The highway shrank to two lanes, and we were in the country. The change was
not gradual; you could have stopped the car and got out at the exact point where
suburbia ended and the red-neck South began. […] There was a motel, then a
weed field, and then on both sides Clabber Girl came out of hiding, leaping onto
the sides of barns, 666 and Black Draught began to swirl, and Jesus began to save.
We hummed along, borne […] on a long tide of patent medicines and religious
billboards […] you would think that the South did nothing but dose itself and sing
gospel songs; you would think that the bowels of the southerner were forever
clamped shut; that he could not open and let natural process flow through him, but
needed one purgative after another in order to make it to church. (Dickey 38)
This description is indicative of several things. First, and most importantly, is its
identification of the South as something that is unconnected with geographical location.
Although Ed’s home is in Georgia, he does not think of himself as living in the South; he
lives in suburbia. The urban regions of the South are presumed to have embraced
progress, civilization, and everything that accompanies them, and so are no longer
associated with the gothic South, America’s repressed other, which is retains all of the
trappings of the rural past. This repression is the strongest identifiable characteristic of
“the red-neck South” that Ed observes through the dual symbolism of religion (spiritual
repression) and excretion (physical repression).
The oppositional relationship between the city and the country is made more
explicit in a conversation between Ed and Lewis a few pages later. Lewis observes that
“up yonder” things are different, “the whole way of taking life and the terms you take it
on.” Ed is disinterested, wondering why he should care about the hillbilly way of life, but
Lewis is insistent: “there may be something important in the hills.” Ed remains skeptical:
“I don’t know anything. I don’t mind going down a few rapids with you, and drinking a
little whiskey by a campfire. But I don’t give a fiddler’s fuck about those hills,” or, by
extension, their inhabitants (40). For Lewis, the hills represent a return to a primal way
of life that he finds appealing at this point in the story. Of course, although he has a
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certain respect for the country, Lewis can still antagonize the people who live there. As
the men negotiate with someone who can drive their cars downriver to meet them, Ed is
horrified by Lewis’s insistence on haggling about price: “I could see the man was
insulted; Lewis himself had told me that the worst thing you can do is to throw something
back at these mountain people” (64). His competitive spirit backfires when he races
ahead of their guides, determined to reach the river on his own. He takes a wrong turn,
much to the amusement of the man he had just attempted to humiliate, who drawls out
“Where you goin’, city boy?” and then mock-encourages him: “You’ll find it. Ain’t
nothin’ but the biggest river in the state” (67). What might sound like good-natured
teasing has a mean edge, on both sides.
The opening scenes of the film, though taken directly from the book, are much
more condensed than in the novel, and the sense of antagonism is consequently more
pronounced. The novel begins with a lengthy segment that follows Ed through a normal
day as vice-president of a small graphics consulting firm, details the debate between the
four over whether to embark on the trip or not, and describes Ed’s preparations for
departure. The film begins with the men discussing their trip in voice-over, the dialogue
taking place alongside images of the land being torn apart by heavy machinery, and
transitions quickly to their arrival in the small town of Oree from which they hope to
embark. Here, with magnificent economy, the film draws the battle lines between the
men from the city and the men in the country, which are essentially lines of wealth,
power, and social class, but also (to the city men) lines of basic humanity. As far as they
can tell, the people of the country are barely people at all. But, if the hillbilly residents of
Oree look grotesque, the protagonists’ treatment of them (with the exception of Drew) is
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equally grotesque. Bobby, the least fit of the men, also shows the least respect to the
locals. He largely declines to speak to them directly. When a gas station attendant
finally emerges at their first stop, Bobby spots him first, but turns away, saying, “Lewis,
we got a live one here,” as he gestures dismissively over his shoulder. A few minutes
later, as Drew engages in the famous “Dueling Banjos” number with a local boy, Bobby
walks up to Ed and quietly observes, “Talk about genetic deficiency. Ain’t that pitiful?”
Seconds later, another strange-looking local walks up and asks, “Who’s pickin’ the banjo
here?” Bobby stares at him for a few seconds, and then pointedly looks away,
suppressing a smile (Ed ignores the question, as well). His sole exchange with anyone
other than his companions comes when he approaches the gas station attendant and
mockingly says, “I love the way you wear that hat.” The man takes the hat off and looks
at it before replacing it on his head and contemptuously replying, “You don’t know
nothin’.”
So palpable is the suspicion between city people and country people that it is
unsurprising to find that it extended behind the scenes into the actual film production, as
demonstrated by Edward Ramey, the local who played the attendant. According to Frank
Rickman, the local location scout and production adviser, after one scene had to be
stopped due to loud noise made by a tree frog, Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight (Lewis and
Ed, respectively) and director John Boorman all said they had never heard of a tree frog
before. Ramey, insulted by their ignorance, marched indignantly up to the men and
asked “Don’t you know nothing?” Ramey himself, whose character breaks into an
impromptu dance during the “Dueling Banjos” scene, later said that he saw production
assistants oiling the ground before he began. Although this was undoubtedly to keep
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Ramey’s feet from kicking up too much dust, he declared, “I believe they thought I’d
slide down that hillside. […] They was just having their fun, I reckon” (qtd. in
Williamson 165). Meanwhile, Boorman (perhaps due to his British nationality) got away
with constantly referring to the locals as “hillbillies,” despite the term’s connotations.
For J.W. Williamson, though, the “crowning irony” of the entire production was
Rickman’s creative contribution, including being the one to suggest the infamous “squeal
like a pig” portion of the film’s shocking rape scene. Williamson observes that while
Rickman dreamed up “better ideas about how to make Bobby the insurance salesman
suffer, the fictional hillbilly characters were coached into a depiction of awfulness that
would be used against Rickman and his kin forever” (167).
In terms of both theme and genre, the hillbilly rape is the central scene of the
movie. The impact of the horror relies on depicting something that is both unimaginably
awful and completely unexpected. In this case, two filthy rednecks emerge from the
woods and take Bobby and Ed captive as they put ashore to rest. One of the men
humiliates and then sodomizes Bobby, and then Ed is nearly forced to perform fellatio on
the other. In the nick of time (for Ed, if not for Bobby), Lewis comes to the rescue,
killing one of the hillbillies with an arrow. The other one escapes. For both the audience
and the characters, the trip down the river has now taken on a completely different
meaning, though it should be immediately clear that this was the meaning envisioned by
the author all along. The opening scene, in which the men are heard discussing the trip
over footage of the construction that will drown the river, explicitly states the movie’s
central theme. Lewis’ voice emerges above the rest, explaining the reason for the dam
and what it means: “You push a little more power into Atlanta, little more air60
conditioning for your smug little suburb, and you know what’s gonna happen? We’re
gonna rape this whole goddamn landscape. We’re gonna rape it!” And yet, by seeking to
penetrate the watery canal of the river with their phallic canoes, Lewis and his
companions are enacting their own rape of the natural on a small, symbolic scale. Now,
though, the tables have turned. Even more than the citizens of Oree, the hillbilly rapists
seem like a literal embodiment of the natural/rural past, particularly in that they enact
nature’s vengeance on the trespassers. In the novel, as in the film, they arrive without
introduction: “Two men stepped out of the woods” (107). They come from nowhere and
have no identity, seemingly appearing out of the wilderness much as their ancestors had
disappeared into it, terrifying embodiments of the gothic past. There is no apparent
motive for their actions. They simply are, and they simply do. Furthermore, they draw
the four companions towards a “natural” state of pure survival, of kill-or-be-killed. This,
at least, is what the men all assume. Just as the hillbillies’ presence and motives are a
cipher, there is a terrible ambiguity surrounding what happens after the initial encounter.
Drew is killed, and Ed scales a cliff to shoot a mountain man with an arrow. That is all
anyone knows for certain. It is reasonable to believe that Drew is shot by the vengeful
survivor of Lewis’ attack, and that this survivor is the man Ed kills atop the cliff, but the
lack of certainty is troubling. However, once Ed has demonstrated his worthiness by
defeating nature’s champion, the river becomes suddenly cooperative. The men are
forced to painstakingly dispose of the first hillbilly by dragging the corpse far inland and
laboriously digging out a grave with their bare hands. However, the second hillbilly’s
body is concealed by the river itself, along with Drew’s body. Finally, the last major set
of rapids, where the men agree to claim that Drew’s death and Lewis’s accident took
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place, actually lets them pass miraculously unscathed. The river in Deliverance is a
powerful ally if one can survive by its ruthless code.
Ed’s lone return home mirrors the arrival to the countryside, with one important
difference: “After four hours I passed slowly from the Country of Nine-Fingered People
and Prepare to Meet Thy God into the Drive-ins and Motels and Homes of the Whopper,
but all I could see was the river” (267). Having narrowly escaped ravishing at the hands
of the terrifying country other, he steps back out of the past and into the present,
emerging from the experience a more complete man, now with the river by his side.
However, where the novel ends in serenity, the film ends with a much-imitated waking
nightmare. Ed dreams a vision of the dead white hand of the man he murdered rising
from the dark waters of the lake that has drowned the Cahulawassee, and awakes in a
cold sweat. As the credits roll to the upbeat sounds of banjo music, he lies in bed, unable
to sleep, and the final image is of those same dark waters as the banjo music quickly
fades into a deeply ominous thrum. For contemporary audiences, the image is even more
fraught with horror. We are certain of what Ed only fears, that the awful specter of the
hillbilly from hell will rise from the lake again and again to terrorize our screens and stalk
our imaginations for as long as his violent and perverse appetites remain within the
American subconscious.
Certainly many of the extras in the film, and their country neighbors both far and
near, felt they had good reason to resent the way Boorman portrayed them in
Deliverance. According to Armour, the “residents of north Georgia angrily believe that
Boorman scoured the hills looking for the worst sort of people.” However, he goes on to
declare that “they miss the point. People like these mountain folk do exist and they could
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easily respond to outsiders just as their counterparts in the movie do” (284). Perhaps
Armour does not include the two rapists in his last statement, but he is certainly correct
that Boorman located most of his extras among genuine mountain-dwelling people.
More to the point, perhaps, is the fact that Boorman’s search for “the worst sort of
people” comes directly from the novel by way of the screenplay. In Dickey’s novel,
when the gas station attendant played by Ramey first appears, he is described by Ed as
looking “like a hillbilly in some badly cast movie, a character actor too much in character
to be believed” (55). In the screenplay, Dickey describes the character as “almost
ridiculously country, almost like a caricature” (24). The local boy who plays a banjo
with Drew appears in the screenplay as “an albino boy, most probably a half-wit, as backcountry as they come, likely from a family or community inbred to the point of imbecility
and albinism” (27). Appearances being of paramount importance to the film, the boy
who was found to fit Dickey’s cruel description could not actually play the banjo at all.
Another boy was hidden behind him with an arm through his sleeve to finger the right
strings and give the appearance of playing. Finally, the man hired to drive the cars
downriver is pictured as “a kind of red-neck Thor […] an enormous, country-brutallooking man, with no humor in him. He suggests nothing but brutality and stupidity” (3132).
Furthermore, in a 1970 interview, Dickey declared that his hillbilly rapists were
based on real people, friends of his father when he was growing up. He explains:
You know, there’s some kind of absolutism about country people. […] there’s
almost no hill family, or “crackers” as we call them at home, that doesn’t have at
least one relative in prison. […] most of them are in for murder. Life and death up
in those Georgia hill counties, life and death are very basic gut-type things, and if
somebody does something that violates your code, you kill him, and you don’t
think twice about it. […] you’d just better think twice before you commit yourself
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to being tried, up in those mountain communities that are inbred to the point of
imbecility and albinoism, where everybody is everybody’s kin. (Heyen 153-154)
One struggles to imagine how Dickey would elaborate on the senseless, unprovoked
assault described in his novel as an action dictated by a hillbilly “code.” More
importantly, Dickey’s comments reveal a somewhat appalling prejudice, and a
willingness to paint large groups of people with broad, generalizing strokes. Duane Carr
points out that these remarks, “though rendered as an observation, [are] really only one
more repetition of a much over-worked stereotype of hill people” and that such
observations are frequently “based on past experience, not with life in the hills, but with
literature, the movies, and television” (4). Dickey’s interviewers, a pair of faculty at a
university in New York, describe the hillbillies as “wonderfully realized;” evidence,
perhaps, that Dickey has succeeded in tapping into (and reinforcing) common cultural
perceptions regarding his subject, not in illuminating any concrete realities about them.
Within the fictional space of the novel (where the descriptions come from the
characters) and of the film (where any conscious judgment is up to the prejudice of the
viewer), one might suggest that the author/director is merely highlighting the extreme
othering of country folk by city folk, and the tension that exists between the two worlds.
However, when one peels back the thin veil surrounding the creative process and finds an
author who is actively prescribing that his story be populated by real-life “ridiculously
country caricatures,” and a director who is more than ready to oblige, it becomes clear
that some storytellers are in the business of creating what audiences perceive as reality as
much as they are commenting on it. Perhaps even more troublingly, as the conscious
arbiters of the subconscious repository of cultural ideas and prejudices, they become
active participants in the continued regional othering of the South.
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CHAPTER FOUR
Large and Startling Figures: Adapting Wise Blood and the Christ-Haunted South
Flannery O’Connor could almost have been talking about the popular reception of
Deliverance when she lamented in 1960 (perhaps a bit disingenuously) that “anything
that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless
it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic” (815). When an
interviewer questioned her about the grotesque in her own work a few years later, she
replied, “We’re all grotesque and I don’t think the Southerner is any more grotesque than
anyone else” (233). Despite these remarks, which seem to indicate an awareness of the
othering of the South, and a rejection of it, O’Connor frequently made conscious use of
the grotesque in her own depictions of the South. Her aim in doing so, however, was
markedly different from that of authors like James Dickey:
My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will
have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse and the
unacceptable. […] The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life
distortions which are repugnant to him, […] and he may well be forced to take
ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When
you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a
little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it
does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of
hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
(805-806)
Dickey’s Deliverance draws a clear border around the South, setting it apart as the dark,
abject id of America. However, where Dickey depicts a land terrorized by degenerate
hillbillies, O’Connor envisions a different sort of haunting.
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In one of her most famous and widely-quoted descriptions of the region,
O’Connor observed that “while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly
Christ-haunted” (861). This aphorism is a particularly apt description of a region where
Christianity can always be found ghosting across the cultural landscape. O’Connor’s
South is simply a microcosm of the rest of the world as she perceives it “by the light of”
her Christian faith. Her stories “however tangibly [they] begin in local facts, […]
continue into situations and revelations that are parabolic or anagogical” (Gossett 493).
By her reckoning, “it is the peculiar burden of the fiction writer that he has to make one
country do for all” (802). For O’Connor, as for Dickey, that country is the state of
Georgia. Unlike Dickey, though, she depicts its inhabitants as strange and even
grotesque in order to illuminate some larger truth about her Catholic faith and its relation
to the modern world. However, this purpose is so unique to O’Connor that her audience
can easily miss it amidst the larger context of what the South represents in American
culture. Perhaps this explains her frequent cause for complaint about the mislabeling and
(in the case of a radically-altered made-for-TV adaptation of “The Life You Save May Be
Your Own”) misappropriation of her work. Nevertheless, she must have been aware that
her fiction “takes the risk […] of being misread and dismissed, because though [it]
originates in the social […] and historical reality of her region, no interpretation of it on
these grounds alone is complete” (Gossett 493). An examination of the 1979 film
adaptation of her first novel, Wise Blood (1952), reveals the difficulties and
complications of understanding O’Connor’s work on her own terms amidst the cultural
connotations which surround her southern setting.
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O’Connor expressed a conviction that “no one but a Catholic could have written”
Wise Blood. In saying this, she is specifically excluding Protestants from the pool of
potential authors, however she goes on to add that “of course no unbeliever or agnostic
could have written it because it is entirely Redemption-centered in thought” (923).
Nevertheless, fifteen years after her death, the novel was brought to the screen under the
direction of John Huston, a firm agnostic. After her disastrous experience with television
during her lifetime, O’Connor could probably scarcely have imagined the result: that
Huston appears to have been extraordinarily faithful to her vision. One contemporary
critic referred to the film as “an uncompromising act of fidelity,” adapted “with chilling
tenacity,” and, upon re-reading the novel, found that it was “close enough to have been a
working, if not a shooting, script” (Young 254). This, no doubt, had something to do
with the screenwriters, Benedict and Michael Fitzgerald, who are not only staunch
Catholics (Benedict has since collaborated with Mel Gibson on the screenplay for The
Passion of the Christ), but are also the sons of Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, the literary
executor of O’Connor’s estate and editor of her letters, respectively. That Huston’s
vision aligns so closely with O’Connor’s is a testament to the artistic integrity they both
share. However, in their appreciation for the close relationship between novel and film,
these early critics somewhat failed to recognize the film’s artistic autonomy from its
source. As Michael Tarantino explains in his review of the film:
it may be instructive to note the frequent intersections of intentions between
Huston and O'Connor, especially in matters of tone, with each work developing
the reverberative qualities of word or image. There is a literal quality to the film
in each shot, each sequence; yet there is always some mystery, some obscure
crazedness, behind Huston's crystalline images. (16)
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From the opening titles, which definitively declare this to be “John Huston’s Wise
Blood,” what we see can best be described as Huston’s own cinematic, religious, and
cultural commentary on the South in the late 1970s, layered over a direct transposition of
O’Connor’s narrative of Southern religion in the late 1940s. There is an additional
dimension that was not there before (although O’Connor’s work is by no means
incomplete), much like an animated character cel combines with the painted background
to create a composite image. At the same time, just as physicists cannot measure the
position of a particle without changing its velocity, Huston cannot illuminate O’Connor’s
vision without altering it.
In some ways, these alterations stand out so vividly precisely because O’Connor’s
novel is so strikingly visual. Film, constructed from a series of images, will inevitably be
intimately concerned with issues of vision and sight. Conrad, of course, described his
task as a novelist as a primarily visual one (at least in some sense): “My task which I am
trying to achieve is, by the powers of the written word, to make you hear, to make you
feel—it is, before all, to make you see” (qtd. in McFarlane 3). Some fifty years later, in
“Writing Short Stories,” Flannery O’Connor explained the task of the writer of fiction in
strikingly similar terms:
Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see
and they will not be a substitute for seeing. For the writer of fiction, everything
has its testing point in the eye […] The first and most obvious characteristic of
fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted,
and touched […] learning to see is the basis for learning all the arts except music.
[…] Fiction writing is […] a matter of showing things. (91, 93)
The apparent influence of Conrad’s artistic philosophy here is no coincidence. O’Connor
frequently cited Conrad as a favorite author and major influence, and referred to him
often in letters and essays, even quoting his desire “to make you see.” Many of the
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metaphors she uses to explain and describe art, even literary art, are visual. Not
surprisingly, then, her fiction reflects the same concern with putting the reader in visual
contact with a scene.
Michael Klein describes how, in 1951, Caroline Gordon (the wife of celebrated
Southern poet Allen Tate) read an early manuscript of Wise Blood and wrote to O’Connor
about it. In the letter, Gordon praises O’Connor’s abilities as a writer and a storyteller,
but suggests several passages that “could have been more successful had they been more
effectively visualized” (Klein 231). Some of these passages were revised prior to
publication, and Klein is quick to note that the passages Gordon drew attention to are the
basis for many of the most visually effective scenes in Huston’s film. One of O’Connor’s
chief concerns is with creating a world that can be visualized. Even on a thematic level,
Wise Blood returns again and again to the motif of blindness and true sight. One possible
reason for the startling ease with which O’Connor’s bizarre characters and situations
transition from page to screen in Wise Blood is that, just like her novel, film is primarily
concerned with the visual; that is, what it can place before our eyes, or what it can make
us see. Clearly her style is extraordinarily well-suited to the medium of film. However,
the substance of O’Connor’s fiction presents obvious difficulties to adaptation as a
conventional American production, both because such an undertaking must defy
expectations with respect to the South, and because such a film must flout the storytelling
principles that mainstream movies follow. With characters who are difficult to like,
events laden with symbolic meaning, and an ending that seems to offer neither happiness
nor closure, Wise Blood seems a particularly unlikely candidate for the Hollywood
treatment.
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As an author more known for her short stories, O’Connor’s novels can be difficult
to unpack. Typically, her short fiction follows the more-or-less predictable (for one
familiar with her stories) range of motion of a single, eccentric character and those
immediately around them (often family members). Wise Blood, by contrast, does not
seem to follow the usual neat arc, and involves a variety of disparate characters with
widely diverse spheres of action. The place of this novel within O’Connor’s larger body
of work becomes much clearer, however, when the novel is regarded as a skillful
conglomeration of connected elements which, alone, might make up several discrete,
individual short stories. There is the story of Enoch Emory, the stupid teenage boy, alone
in the big city and desperate for human contact, who eventually becomes obsessed with a
man in a gorilla suit. There is the story of Mrs. Flood, the middle-aged landlady who
slowly becomes fixated on her odd, self-flagellating tenant, desperate to discover his
secret. And, most importantly, there is the story of Hazel Motes (“Haze”), the fauxdissolute war veteran who is so anxious to escape from Jesus, the “wild ragged figure”
who “move[s] from tree to tree in the back of his mind” (11), that he starts his own
Church without Christ and shouts its message from street corners. In the end, all of these
stories are linked situationally, but also in a deeper sense, as stories about people who are
somehow alienated by the superficiality and faithlessness of modern society, and who
desire something deeper that they cannot quite identify.
One of the most prominent elements of the novel is its darkly comic tone.
Throughout the work, O’Connor carefully balances her grotesque images with a
humorous irony that manifests itself in many ways, but is ultimately part of “the divine
comedy of redemption” (Gossett 490). Enoch Emory serves as one of the more comical
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characters in the story, and the passages involving him, particularly when he is apart from
Hazel, can be quite funny. The most notable instance is his stalking of Gonga the Gorilla
as the “movie star” visits the premier of his new film at theaters all across town. The
situation is so bizarre as to evoke a visceral sense of amusement from the reader. The
dialog is a frequent source of humor, as well. The sheer absurdity of what a given
character is saying, though delivered with utter seriousness and conviction, causes an
exchange to become funny; for example, Enoch’s inability to decipher the mysterious
sign which reads “MVSEVM,” and his description of the mummy that he will eventually
steal for Hazel as a man who was “once as tall as you or me. Some A-rabs did it to him
in six months” (56). The humor of the novel, and of the Enoch Emory character, is an
element that is particularly prominent in the film to a degree that can be distracting for
the viewer. Some of Enoch’s more comical appearances feel episodic and irrelevant, like
digressions from the main story whose function is to “lighten the mood.” In reality, they
are significant, but in playing up the slapstick elements of these scenes with clowning and
over-the-top music, Huston obscures their symbolic meaning. Although this never quite
overwhelms the story, there is a sense that the audience is meant to laugh and to feel
superior in response to the characters’ foibles, rather than to learn from or understand
them.
Fortunately, the novel’s tightly-packed web of interconnected themes remains
resonant with the cinematic approach. In particular, O’Connor attaches a great deal of
importance to perception throughout Wise Blood. Hazel Motes, having exchanged his
army uniform for a dark suit and wide-brimmed hat, is mistaken for a preacher by
everyone he meets, and in some ways he becomes one. Haze himself believes that Asa
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Hawks is really a blind preacher, and that his daughter Sabbath Lily is an innocent girl,
although neither assumption is correct. Enoch perceives, in the novel’s greatest flash of
insight, that the “new jesus” Haze is looking for, the Christ without Christ, must be the
dried and shriveled corpse from the museum. As previously mentioned, there is also a
recurring motif of blindness and sight: Asa Hawks pretends to be blind, but can actually
see. Hazel Motes can see, but is spiritually blind, before ultimately blinding himself with
lime and gaining spiritual sight. This is just one of several shocking acts of violence
(another hallmark of O’Connor’s fiction) that occur at significant points throughout the
narrative, such as when Hazel murders the “false preacher,” Solace Layfield, and when
the policeman destroys Hazel’s car. O’Connor’s explanation for this is that she finds
“violence is strangely capable of returning [her] characters to reality and preparing them
to accept their moments of grace” (qtd. in Bernstein 145).
While critics approach the crucial role of O’Connor’s theological agenda in a
variety of ways, criticism of the novel ultimately centers on the idea that Hazel is (as
O’Connor frequently explained) a “Christian malgre lui” (in spite of himself) who cannot
ultimately escape his own redemption by Jesus Christ. In a note written for the novel’s
second edition in 1962, O’Connor said that, for many of her readers, “Hazel Motes’
integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from
tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author Hazel’s integrity lies in his not being
able to” (qtd. in Cooper 40). As a Southerner and a Catholic writing in the late-1940s, a
time of renewed American prosperity, but consequently of diminishing spirituality,
O’Connor was very much concerned with modern man and his struggles to adjust to a
society that has relegated its deities to strange and shallow roles. Wise Blood displays a
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keen eye for the absurdities, but also the realities, of everyday Southern life in a region
that was, in some ways, just catching up to the rest of country. O’Connor’s sense of
concrete detail, though sharing a complex relationship with her dense application of
theologically-charged symbolism, is ultimately what makes Wise Blood an engaging
experience for the reader, despite a self-professed use of the grotesque that might seem to
distance the audience from her characters and their struggles. In their attempt to draw
O’Connor’s vision out of the novel and onto the screen intact, the screenwriters attempted
to lean heavily on a sense of real people and real places. In an interview with Carter
Martin, Benedict Fitzgerald explained, “I was trying […] to make a clear and
straightforward adaptation of the story—because the story itself has all the elements we
need to suggest rather than openly point out the allegory” (qtd. in Bernstein 147).
The film begins with an opening credit sequence that, while not drawn from the
novel at all, effectively establishes everything the audience needs to know about this
adaptation. The credits, which were written in crayon by a child, appear over a series of
black-and-white still photographs. When the title appears, it is displayed as Jhon
Huston’s Wise Blood. There are two things which are immediately apparent. First, the
director’s first name, which appears a total of three times during the credits, has been
misspelled. In his discussion of the film, Stephen Cooper interprets this as deliberate
attempt on the part of the director to signal a “commitment to the spirit, if not the letter,
of O’Connor’s novel” (43). However, in an interview about the film, the writer-producer
reveals that the mistake was unintentional, but that it struck them as “a perfect metaphor
for what [they] were trying to do in the film […] that this was not exactly supposed to be
hyperrealism […] that there was going to be something deliberately, slightly
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manufactured and twisted about this” (Fitzgerald). This clearly indicates an
understanding on the part of the writers that the southern setting of the film is not a literal
depiction of the South, and a desire to communicate that distinction to the audience.
The second notable aspect of this title is the possessive apostrophe attached to the
director’s name. This movie is not Wise Blood, it is Jhon (John) Huston’s Wise Blood.
The source may be O’Connor’s novel, but Huston is the creator of the film. However,
this statement is not as strong as it first appears. The film names Barbara McKenzie as
the photographer responsible for the images used in the credits. Shortly after the film’s
theatrical release, most of the photographs (along with many others) were published by
McKenzie in a book entitled Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia. These photographs, taken
over a period of many years, are all of the area where O’Connor spent much of her own
life, and where she experienced the culture she describes so vividly in her fiction. The
intention of the director could not be more clear: This film may be “his” version of Wise
Blood, but it is still Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia. However, it remains to be seen
whether Huston recognizes the distinction between Georgia and “Flannery O’Connor’s
Georgia.”
His intentional evocation of place has as much to do with casting as it does with
location. Huston maintained (and most critics who have discussed the film agree) that
the actors selected to portray the major characters are all extraordinarily well-suited to
their roles. Much of the praise is heaped upon Brad Dourif for his intense and
compelling portrayal of Hazel Motes (a role that was originally slated to go to a young
Tommy Lee Jones). Nevertheless, there is also a great deal of attention paid to Ned
Beatty (who made his screen debut in Deliverance, and appears here as Hoover Shoats)
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and the rest of the cast. Many roles were inhabited by performers who were (and still
remain) virtual unknowns. In addition, the smaller roles in the film were largely filled by
nonprofessionals from the area. The man who sells Haze his car was a local who had
never acted before. The policeman who destroys Hazel’s car was portrayed by the sheriff
of Macon. The woman who played Leora Watts was an actual prostitute. Small wonder
that the filmmakers were on the lookout for ways to indicate that the film would not be
hyperrealistic. As O’Connor explains:
to say that fiction proceeds by the use of detail does not mean the simple,
mechanical piling-up of detail. Detail has to be controlled by some overall
purpose, and every detail has to be put to work for you. Art is selective. What is
there is essential and creates movement. (93)
An understanding of the selectivity of art is essential to understanding how Huston’s film
operates. Even during the verisimilitudinous opening titles, where we see “the
ramshackle stores, the kudzu-bordered roads, the religious and commercial billboards” of
Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia (a description evoking Disney theme park attractions in
the vein of “Tom Sawyer Island” or “Pocahontas Indian Village”), a “more intricate
merging of actual and fictional milieu is suggested by Barbara McKenzie’s photographs”
(Gossett 489). These are locations that actually exist, but they have been carefully
selected by Huston from among McKenzie’s photographs, themselves carefully and
artistically composed, in order to support the symbolic framework of the narrative.
It is precisely this element of the film’s introductory images that Pamela Demory
objects to in “Faithfulness vs. Faith: John Huston’s Version of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise
Blood.” Registering an odd complaint about the effect of these photographs on the film’s
audience, she claims that they “create a documentary-like effect” that presents “a ‘real’
location for the fictional story.” However, “in their representation of a world that is rural,
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poor, and imbued with signs of fundamentalist Christianity, these images also conform to
the familiar ideas about the South that have been generated by popular culture and media
representations.” This is certainly not a surprising observation in light of the previous
discussion about O’Connor’s cultural context. The question is how this affects the
perceptions of the audience. Counterintuitively, Demory argues that, by beginning with a
recognizable place rather than with the somewhat off-putting character of Hazel Motes
(as the novel does), the film erases the novel’s ironic distance from its subject, replacing
it with increased sympathy for the film’s characters. The implications of this, that the
filmmakers are exploiting audience perceptions and indulging in broad southern
stereotypes, and that the result forges a connection between audience and characters, will
require further discussion. However, Michael Klein, while agreeing that the images are
“documentary-like in quality,” interprets their message somewhat differently: “as no
narrative context has yet been established, we respond to them as visual tropes,
significant in themselves and an indication that we should keep our eyes on the cultural
background throughout the film” (231).
Klein engages in a detailed discussion of the photographs, and a close
examination of them reveals that they largely fall into one of two categories (many
belong in both). The first type of image is connected with travel (i.e., roads, automobiles,
etc.). Of the eight images shown during the credits, the first, second, sixth and seventh
prominently feature country roads (all are shots of roadside signs). The third image is of
a roadside business selling tires (as well as peaches and plums), and the fourth image is
of a stone sign marking the “C.T. Lord Highway” running between Toomsboro and
Milledgeville (O’Connor’s hometown). Klein describes these images putting the viewer
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in mind of “Hazel as pilgrim beginning his journey” (232). This idea resonates with
Laura Jehn Menides’ account of the film in “John Huston’s Wise Blood and the Myth of
the Sacred Quest.” Menides draws attention to the film’s opening scene (after the credits)
which, unlike the novel, depicts Hazel’s return to the family home, which he finds
abandoned. He wanders through the ruined structure, taking it in, and then departs for
Taulkinham. The scene appears in a flashback in the novel, but Menides accounts for the
decision to change the order of events in order to “show the hero leaving home and then
beginning his journey.” Hazel’s journey is to be understood in terms of “a mythic journey
or quest […] toward an important goal.” To achieve this goal, Haze must “travel and
suffer, experience frustration and failure, discover important things about [himself] and
the world, and eventually reach […] a symbolic or literal home” (208).
The second type of images shown during the credits contains references to
religion in the South, many of them linked explicitly with symbols of commercialism.
For example, the first and seventh photographs depict road signs which exhort passing
motorists to “repent” and to “seek Jesus.” The second photograph is of a group of signs
pointing the way to two nearby Baptist churches. The signpost is topped with an
advertisement for Coca-Cola. The fifth image is of the front of a roadside stand,
displaying a weird hodgepodge of kitschy knickknacks (including, significantly, a plush
gorilla doll seated in a rocking chair). To the left is a large wall hanging of da Vinci’s
“The Last Supper.” Small Confederate flags flank the chair, and a larger flag hangs
behind it. “Here the central symbols of a regional culture […] are dominated by
structures of commodity fetishism” (Klein 231). The sixth image is of a Dairy Queen
sign whose bulletin reads “REPENT/BE BAPTIZED IN JESUS NAME.” The final
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image is of a grave marked with a cross and a small plastic telephone, the receiver off the
hook, and the words “Jesus Called.” It would be impossible to take these images together
and not conclude that the stage has somehow been set. “Huston's preface to the film [...]
defines a context for Hazel's quest: America as commercial and spiritual wasteland”
(Klein 232).
This theme, although present in O’Connor’s novel, lacks the concrete, literalized
quality that film easily allows. Immediately, within the first few seconds of the film,
Huston brings the tension between faith and its commercialization strikingly into view
with the instantly-recognizable Coca-Cola and Dairy Queen logos. This “cultural
background” of commercialism intensifies as Wise Blood moves into the city of
“Taulkinham” (although the city does not actually exist, Wise Blood was shot on location
in Macon, Georgia). Klein draws attention to a number of scenes in which signs
advertising or denoting various places of business serve to subtly underscore important
elements of various scenes. The most significant of these appears during the scene in
which Hazel finds himself competing with Solace Layfield and Hoover Shoats for his
audience. Situated prominently in the background over Hazel’s shoulder is a giant sign
which simply reads “JESUS CARES.” As the camera shifts over to Layfield and Shoats,
both just out to make a quick buck, we see that the building behind them is labeled “Pepsi
Cola Bottling Company.” Again, in a subtle, unobtrusive way (impossible in a novel),
Huston manages to emphasize this essential alienation that defines Hazel’s conflict with
the society around him.
Several critics have drawn attention to other key scenes in the film which
represent modifications to the letter of O’Connor’s novel while staunchly preserving its
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spirit. Two of the most frequently cited scenes are Haze’s introduction to the “new jesus”
and the loss of his car. In the former, Enoch hands the mummy to Sabbath Lily while
Hazel is asleep and she sneaks it into the bathroom to get a good look at it. Taking a
liking to it, she sweeps it into her arms as though it were a baby and goes to present it to
Haze. He comes to the door of his room, bleary-eyed with sleep, and discovers her there,
holding the “baby” with her sweater pulled up to cover her hair in a visual reference to
the Madonna and Child. The image only strengthens the Messianic mockery represented
by the mummy, making Haze’s reaction that much more understandable. In the novel,
the policeman Hazel encounters pushes his car over a small cliff, and it lands upside
down in a dry field, one wheel flying off. The film stages this scene quite differently,
panning to follow the car down a gentle slope as it picks up speed, racing further and
further out of Hazel’s reach before finally sinking into a pond. Bernstein and Menides
both stress that “the car’s autonomous, lengthy run across the field into a pond,
emphasize more forcefully than the novel the finality of Motes’s loss of the car”
(Bernstein 157). Boyum and Pulleine “can’t help but call up in this context ‘associations
of both burial and baptism’” (Boyum 181). These scenes, and many others, lay open the
filmmakers’ adaptation process of continually drawing the events of the story out onto
the screen, and allowing the deeply embedded metaphorical elements to either follow
along naturally or, if not natural to the new medium, to be preserved via replacement with
something more cinematic.
The musical score of the film also plays a significant thematic role. A “dignified
melodic rendition of ‘The Tennessee Waltz’” runs behind the opening credits, further
affirming the wistful, familiar sense of Southern hospitality welcoming the viewer into
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the world of the film (Cooper 42). Bernstein argues that “the music functions most
prominently of all among the film’s stylistic elements,” likely an accurate assessment
given that most of the film’s critics also single out its score as particularly, even jarringly,
intrusive. There are four notable musical arrangements that can be heard throughout the
film. The “slow” version of “The Tennessee Waltz” reappears at various dramatic points,
such as during the scene in which Hazel is walking through his ruined home, or as Hazel
follows Solace Layfield out to a deserted road to murder him. There is a serene,
nostalgic, distinctively regional quality to the melody which implies a connection to
Haze’s past life which he cannot escape. A different reoccurring piece carries an implied
connection with Hazel’s religious past as well as his ultimate destination: “Simple Gifts”
(often simply called “Shaker Hymn”) from Aaron Copland’s 1944 arrangement for
Appalachian Spring. Bernstein identifies three points during which the melody appears:
First, when Hazel stands at his grandfather’s grave and remembers one of the old man’s
revival sermons via flashback; second, when Haze leaves Mrs. Flood’s house in the rain
after she has proposed that they marry near the end of the film; third, for a few seconds as
the final scene fades into the credits and before the melody fades into yet another
rendition of “The Tennessee Waltz.” The lyrics of “Simple Gifts” (which are not heard
anywhere in the film) resonate powerfully with the arc of Hazel’s spiritual progress: “'Tis
the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,/'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to
be,/And when we find ourselves in the place just right,/[…]To bow and to bend we shan't
be asham'd,/To turn, turn will be our delight,/Till by turning, turning we come round
right” (Brackett).
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The other two melodies are much lighter in tone, and produce a vastly different
effect. One is a “more jaunty, bouncy version” of “The Tennessee Waltz” which plays
(most notably) as Haze drives his new car fitfully out of the lot and when the policeman
shoves Haze’s car off of the road (Bernstein 156). An even more broadly comic tune
(built around zany banjo-picking) accompanies some of Enoch’s more colorful exploits,
particularly his theft of the mummy and of the gorilla suit. Both of these pieces have a
slapstick quality that deeply colors every scene in which they are heard. These musical
motifs in particular offer the strongest indication that some creative force behind the
adaptation of Wise Blood saw the material as broadly comic, maintaining an ironic
distance from the characters that threatens to reduce them to figures of fun rather than
human beings on the path to redemption. This speaks to the central tension in all of
O’Connor’s work: whether to laugh at her characters or learn from them. It is a line that
she walks so delicately as to present great difficulty for anyone attempting to retrace her
steps, particularly if that is not the primary goal. This was clearly the goal of the film’s
screenwriters, but perhaps not of the director and crew.
In charging that the film’s use of real locations destroys its ironic distance,
Demory not only misses the effect of the score entirely, she fails to satisfactorily explain
why ironic distance is desirable except as (by her interpretation) a matter of fidelity to the
novel. Of equal interest is Demory’s implication that the images, which represent
common tropes about the South, serve to shrink rather than widen the gap between the
“normal” viewer and the eccentric character that inhabits this landscape. Emphasizing
southern stereotypes generally highlights the comical or disturbing differences between
viewer and subject, as it does so effectively (and even maliciously) in Deliverance.
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However, in this case Demory appears to be saying that the stereotypes act as a sort of
cultural shorthand which transform the bizarre and off-putting characters and situations
of O’Connor’s novel into the familiar (though still not, perhaps, the comfortable). This
seems, by some happy accident, to have captured perfectly O’Connor’s penchant for
drawing “large and startling” southern figures as a means to communicate something
which was, to her, universal. However, it leaves the film open to the same possibility for
misinterpretation as its source, though perhaps somewhat less so. Joy Gould Boyum goes
so far as to hint that the problem lies, not with the film, but with the novel, and that the
distance maintained in Wise Blood is “the flaw in O’Connor’s work […] its lack of
human acceptability.” Had the filmmakers not somehow accounted for this element of
O’Connor’s novel, her characters “might seem to us too mad, too repellent, too
unbelievable to invite us to go beyond their immediate impression and search for their
larger significance” (Boyum 177-178).
Given the critically-acclaimed result of this narrative collaboration between
Flannery O’Connor and John Huston, it may be somewhat surprising to realize that, just
as the film Huston made is not the novel O’Connor wrote, neither is it the film that
Huston set out to make. An account of what transpired behind the scenes reveals the
source of the seemingly-contradictory nature of some of the film’s elements, which
sometimes invite us to laugh at the characters and sometimes invite us to join them in
their struggles. In “Wise Blood: A Matter of Life and Death,” Francine Prose reveals that
Huston approached the filming of the movie convinced of “the unmediated comedy of
Hazel’s obsession” and with the idea “that he was shooting a picture about the semiridiculous religious manias prevalent throughout the South.” The screenwriters, by
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contrast, had envisioned Hazel’s story as one of “redemption and salvation,” prompting
“a hasty script conference about Hazel’s fate” in which Huston finally conceded their
point. Prose conjectures that:
Perhaps [O'Connor] would have thought that the progress of the production had,
in some mysterious way, paralleled the plot of her novel. In spite of himself, the
director had made a film about a Christian in spite of himself, groping his way
toward redemption.
In an odd twist, studying the production of Wise Blood reveals that the novel
modified the film just as surely as the film modified the novel; their interaction through
adaptation displays the very essence of intertextual dialog. If the two texts are indeed in
an open, ongoing conversation with each other rather than “closed” and therefore silent, it
is possible that each contains some “key” to “unlocking” meaning within the other. In
this case, John Huston’s Wise Blood makes O’Connor’s characters and their story more
real to us, and they become figures we can identify with and learn from through their
dissatisfaction with the superficiality of their (and our) culture. Meanwhile, Huston
narrowly escaped the superficiality which O’Connor’s audience so frequently falls prey
to: of treating her story as a comedy about southern religious eccentricity. Through their
mutual commitment to making audiences “see,” O’Connor kept Huston unwittingly
grounded in its deep awareness of the spiritual reality of modern life. The film version of
Wise Blood, while consciously drawing on cultural images of the South, takes its
audience beyond regional stereotypes and into the world of O’Connor’s eternal
perspective. Meanwhile, Hazel Motes’ spiritual identity crisis foreshadows an imminent
cultural identity crisis that began to emerge in southern narratives a decade after Huston’s
film.
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CHAPTER FIVE
“Maybe Dixie’s Not the Right Song:” Adaptation and the Southern Identity Crisis
In a 1941 essay, Carson McCullers suggests that “The South has always been a
section apart from the rest of the United States, having interests and a personality
distinctly its own. Economically and in other ways it has been used as a sort of colony to
the rest of the nation” (McCullers 260). Although her choice of words is interesting, this
idea is basically consistent with other observations about the region, including C. Vann
Woodward’s statement that the South’s military defeat in the Civil War had cut it off
from the myth of American success and victory, and Teresa Goddu’s exploration of the
literary and cultural classification of the South as America’s dark “other.” What each of
these descriptions implies is a conception of southern identity that is at odds with the
national identity (and, specifically, white male identity in both cases). Cinematic
depictions of the South have consistently reinforced this conflict of identity while dealing
with it in different ways. Positive Hollywood depictions of the South, embraced by
southern audiences, frequently sought to promote reconciliation between the southerner
and the American (or northerner) by glorifying the southern way of life and its values as
equal or superior to northern values. As a result, in The Birth of a Nation, white
northerners unite with white southerners on markedly southern terms in order to answer
the threat represented by freed black slaves. Negative depictions, on the other hand, have
emphasized the contrast between southern and American identity, rendering southerners
grotesque; they ultimately either cause their own downfall or are defeated by a non84
southern protagonist. Thus, in Deliverance the hero and his friends journey into the
South from outside, and must achieve victory over the various threats of southern
degeneracy.
This dichotomy has, with few exceptions, traditionally comprised the basic
formula for representations of the South on film. This is not to suggest a complete
absence of ambiguity, but whether devil, saint, or something in between, the protagonist
in these films remained unregenerately southern; an identity that continues to be
inextricably associated with distasteful connotations. However, several films of the late
1980s and early 1990s depict a profound southern identity crisis. In these films, southern
white male identity is associated with violence and racism (the villains are rednecks and
Klansmen), while American white male identity assumes the oppositional virtues of
racial tolerance and democratic justice through law enforcement and the courts (the
heroes are lawmen and lawyers). Confronted with this basic incompatibility between
negative southern values and positive American values and forced to choose between
them, the protagonists repeatedly reject their southern culture and heritage and face
severe personal consequences as a result. Ironically, but not surprisingly, the portrayal of
this struggle is often guilty of the same white racial privileging that it condemns as a
fundamentally southern characteristic. The resulting films are what Allison Graham calls
“Hollywood’s white redemption tales,” in which the “man of law, the redeemed southern
white man” defeats the “irrationally violent redneck […] as proof of the inherent
goodness of all other whites” (17, 148). This basic formula of a protagonist who
“becomes less Southern and more American” (Jansson 275) is repeated in Mississippi
Burning (1988), A Time to Kill, The Chamber, and Ghosts of Mississippi (all 1996).
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Mississippi Burning and Ghosts of Mississippi are both based on actual events, while A
Time to Kill and The Chamber are adaptations of John Grisham novels. An analysis of
these adaptations as well as the other two films reveals how Grisham’s novels, and even
historical events, are co-opted to support this dominant cinematic metanarrative.
Graham traces the cultural origins of the redeemed southern man of law to two
fictional characters, both created in 1960 amidst building racial turmoil. The first is
Andy Taylor, wise sheriff of the all-white town of Mayberry (based on Mt. Airy, North
Carolina), played by Andy Griffith on the enormously popular Andy Griffith Show, which
ran on television from 1960 to 1968. The second is Atticus Finch, who practices law in
Maycomb (based on Monroeville, Alabama) and prevents a lynching before
unsuccessfully defending its intended victim from a bogus rape charge in To Kill a
Mockingbird by Harper Lee (adapted into a successful film in 1962). Graham notes that
where Andy Griffith’s 1930s atmosphere reconstructed “the Depression as a kinder,
gentler time for white America,” the same “temporal displacement” in Mockingbird gave
Lee the ability to “address mainstream television’s taboo subject,” the “mounting fear
and violence surrounding desegregation,” although in her opinion the historical distance
still made audiences conscious of “its remoteness from present-day urgency” (159-160).
In “The Female Voice in To Kill a Mockingbird: Narrative Strategies in Novel and Film,”
Dean Shackleford argues that, despite critical admiration for the fidelity of the adaptation,
the film relocates the novel’s main concern. Namely, where the novel is centered on the
narration by Atticus’ daughter, Scout, and her “female child’s perspectives on an adult
male world,” the film “shifts perspectives […] to the male father figure and the adult
male world,” changing the story’s focus from Scout’s struggles with her own gender
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identity to an overriding interest in Atticus and the rape trial (102-103). Citing its
production during “the turbulent period of the 1960s when racial issues were of interest”
(103) as an explanation for this shift, Shackleford’s observations highlight the subtle
transformations that realign a narrative’s concerns with the prevailing cultural interests.
Nevertheless, Andy Taylor and (especially) Atticus Finch became early prototypes for a
new, enlightened breed of southern authority figure that would return in force with the
highly controversial, highly acclaimed release of Mississippi Burning in 1988.
Mississippi Burning, written by Chris Gerolmo, is loosely based on an FBI
investigation into the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. Relying
on elements of the “buddy cop” genre, the main characters of the film are Ward and
Anderson, two white FBI agents with conflicting personalities and approaches who must
learn to work together in order to succeed. Ward, the younger agent, is officially in
charge and has come to the FBI after working in the Kennedy Justice Department.
During his time there, he was wounded while protecting James Meredith, the first African
American student to enroll in the University of Mississippi. Ward believes in rigorously
following FBI rules and procedures, but he is also ideologically committed to bringing
about racial equality in the South. Meanwhile, Anderson was once the sheriff of a small
Mississippi town, not unlike the one which the agents are now investigating. He is rough
and blunt, and his sense of humor is crude. He knows the region, and he speaks the
heavily accented, “good-old-boy” language of the white locals. He functions as a guide
to both Ward and the audience as the film enters the foreign country of Mississippi.
Anderson uncomfortably occupies the space between the culture of righteous,
enlightened American justice embodied by Ward and the FBI, and the culture of a
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virulently racist and white-supremacist South. As a result, his role in the film leaves him
in a somewhat ambiguous position during much of the story, and he is clearly conflicted
in his attitudes about the South. He simultaneously cautions Ward against any action
which might stir up trouble in the area (“Don’t do it, Mr. Ward. You’ll just start a war.”),
and engages in dialogue with the locals that is calculated to provoke a reaction. His
sympathy with, or at least understanding of, the town’s residents is clear in various
conversations with Ward, but he rarely shows the same level of respect in his encounters
with suspicious rednecks. In the agents’ first encounter with the sneering deputy Clinton
Pell (Brad Dourif), Anderson immediately senses disrespect after they ask for the sheriff.
While Ward politely takes a seat to wait, Anderson sits down on the deputy’s desk and
says, “Listen to me, you backwoods shit-ass, you. You’ve got about two seconds to get
the sheriff out here, or I’m gonna kick the goddamn door in.” He smiles broadly as he
finishes speaking, but before the deputy has a chance to respond, the sheriff emerges
from his office. It is unclear whether this ostentatious display has had any effect on the
deputy, but it has served its intended purpose: to signal to Ward and to the audience that
Anderson “knows how to talk to these people.” Moments later, though, as the agents sit
in their car, Anderson contradicts Ward’s assumption that the account given by the civil
rights office is more reliable than the sheriff’s story: “Lying just don’t come into it […] If
a sheriff in a little town like this says that’s what happened, then that’s what happened.”
Later, Anderson tells Ward not to “even think about” provoking the local white
population by taking a seat in the “colored” section of a crowded diner (Ward ignores the
warning). However, Anderson repeatedly goads whites by joking that he likes baseball
“because it’s the only time that a black man gets to wave a stick at a white man without
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starting a riot.” As a result, Anderson’s attempts to ingratiate himself with the
townspeople are often repulsed. He always enters their gatherings with a friendly smile,
but everyone in the room quickly stops talking and he is left to deal with an awkward
silence. When he happens on an informal meeting of a men’s “social club” at one point,
his arrival forestalls the punch line of a racist joke, but he convinces the reluctant deputy
to supply him with a beer. Forced to make conversation himself amidst the sudden lull,
he launches into a humorous story about his experiences dealing with bootleggers as a
southern sheriff. No one in the room is amused, and Deputy Pell quickly pipes up, “We
ain’t too interested in your good ol’ Mississippi boy stories, Anderson. You ain’t from
here no more.” By this point in the film, Anderson couldn’t agree more. When asked
why he left, he replies “The grits started to leave a bad taste in my mouth.” This offhand
remark cuts straight to the heart of Anderson’s character. This staple of the stereotypical
southern diet serves as a metaphor for his growing discomfort with southern mores and
traditions, but rejecting these values has cut him off from his people, his heritage, and his
identity. Although he has replaced unacceptable southern values with acceptable
American ones, he still speaks with the accent and idioms of a southerner. To his fellow
agents, he is a man from the South, but the people of the South recognize the lack of
connection between the style and the substance of his speech, and see him as an outsider.
Anderson’s ambiguity with regards to the South is in sharp contrast with the other
characters. As Ward tells Anderson, “We’re not killers. That’s the difference between
them and us.” Anderson’s reply reflects his atypical nature: “That’s the difference
between them and you.” This is a world of “us” and “them,” sharply defined camps
which cannot overlap. The attitude is shared by the Mississippi natives. The mayor
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attempts to set Anderson straight about the region: “People got the wrong idea about the
South […] Simple fact is we’ve got two cultures down here: white culture and the
colored culture. That’s the way it always has been and that’s the way it always will be.”
When Anderson responds that “The rest of America don’t see it that way,” Sheriff
Stuckey is quick to interject, “Rest of America don’t mean jack-shit. You in Mississippi
now.” The film presents a monolithic Mississippi (and, by extension, a monolithic South)
which stands in opposition to the nation and must be converted or subjugated.
This element of outside white intervention is the source of much of what
undermines the film’s social message in opposition of racism. The local black population
is portrayed as passive in the face of discrimination. Their response is not only
ineffectual, it is basically nonexistent, and the filmmakers fail utterly to integrate them
into the story in any meaningful way. All of the scenes which feature black characters,
most of which show them either collectively suffering from or reacting to random acts of
violence, feel like digressions from the plot. The only action taken by the black
population in the film occurs after a judge has suspended the sentence of some of the
suspected murderers. In response, the black population riots and destroys their own
section of town (while the local police watch). The agents largely fail to show any sort of
significant concern about (or even knowledge of) the escalating racial violence
transpiring in the margins of this film, although several buildings are burned to the
ground, blacks are terrorized and beaten, and one man is lynched as his family hides
nearby. Anderson and Ward are finally galvanized into taking decisive action and
working together to defeat the KKK network, but the event that enrages and inspires
them to act is, not the lynching which has just transpired, but the brutal beating of a white
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woman with whom Anderson has become romantically involved. By making the
endangerment of a southern white woman the impetus which drives the film’s resolution,
the filmmakers resurrected a conventional trope typical of The Birth of a Nation (1915).
While this raises the dramatic stakes, it does little to promote the enlightened racial
attitudes the film is trying to foster. The film’s director, Alan Parker, seemed to at least
partially understand this by the time he did the DVD commentary for Mississippi
Burning. As the final credits roll, he says:
Is it the definitive Civil Rights story? No. Is it a story told from a black point of
view? No. Did this film get made because the two heroes in it are still white?
Possibly, but that's a reflection of American society as much as it is to do with the
film industry […] if it opened up a debate to discuss racism in America, and if
they used the inadequacy of my film in order to point that out, I'm still proud.
Parker’s desire to shape historical events on film in order to inspire audiences to examine
their own attitudes about race reveals Mississippi Burning to be “a fable for, by, and
about white characters” (Graham 151). However, its graphic depiction of southern
racism was also widely perceived as groundbreaking, and inspired a period of heightened
interest in stories about the Civil Rights Movement.
Not long before Mississippi Burning was released, in 1987, John Grisham
finished writing A Time to Kill, his first novel. However, it received very little attention
until the enormous success of his second novel, The Firm (1991). The Firm and
Grisham’s two subsequent novels, all legal thrillers with colorful but largely incidental
southern settings, were adapted into films in 1993 and 1994. Their success finally led to
the adaptation of A Time to Kill, released in the summer of 1996, and followed a few
months later by the adaptation of Grisham’s fifth novel, The Chamber. Grisham’s direct
inspiration for writing A Time to Kill came from hearing the testimony of a young rape
victim in 1984, but To Kill a Mockingbird is also a clear influence. The novel’s hero is
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Jake Brigance, a young, white lawyer in a small southern town who defends Carl Lee
Hailey, a black man who gunned down the two rednecks that raped his daughter. Despite
some shifts in perspective to black and non-southern characters, the main character is
clearly Jake, who must face a series of trials, both personal and legal, in his quest for
justice. Jake is essentially a surrogate for Grisham, as he makes clear in the Author’s
Note, drawing a series of parallels between himself and his protagonist: “There’s a lot of
autobiography in this book” (xi). The chief concern of the story is the violence that
erupts around the trial, prompting the question of whether it is possible for Carl Lee to
receive a fair hearing in the white-dominated part of Mississippi he inhabits. Much is
made throughout the novel of the white majority in the fictional Ford County, although
the sheriff, Ozzie Walls, is black. He is, we are informed, “the only black sheriff in
Mississippi. […] He took great pride in that fact, since Ford County was seventy-four
percent white […] Not since Reconstruction had a black sheriff been elected in a white
county in Mississippi” (9). Small asides like this appear frequently as background detail
for Grisham’s familiar vision of the South, which emphasizes the region’s exotic
foreignness. As Ellen Roark, a law student from Massachusetts and Jake’s volunteer
assistant for the trial, observes: “I'm not a Southerner and I find this place bewildering
most of the time, but I have developed a perverse love for it. It'll never make sense to me,
but it is fascinating” (297).
Race-related violence is one of the novel’s central features, mostly involving the
Ku Klux Klan, who threaten Jake and the prospective members of Carl Lee’s jury with
burning crosses, attempt to bomb Jake’s house before later burning it down, and kidnap
and beat Roark. There is also a large street brawl outside the courthouse between
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members of the KKK and black protesters that leads to the death of Stump Sisson, the
Imperial Wizard of Mississippi, after someone throws a firebomb at him. The riot
prompts the local government to summon the National Guard to keep order during the
trial. Grisham’s depiction of the near-anarchy provoked by the racially charged trial of
Carl Lee Hailey is reminiscent of the outbreak of arson and murder seen in Mississippi
Burning. Looking back on his novel in a 2004 interview, Grisham indicates the cultural
pressure that prompted some of these images: “I'm really tired of the Ku Klux Klan stuff.
When you write about the South it's got to be about race and I wish I hadn't devoted so
much of the book to the Klan because they don't deserve it” (Jordan 1). Still, in A Time
to Kill, the Klan is just one of several obstacles that Jake must overcome, and not all of
his obstacles are white. Carl Lee attempts to fire him several times. In particular, before
the trial begins, the NAACP comes to town and attempts to take over the defense, making
sure that Carl Lee is aware of the stakes: “Your acquittal by a white jury for the killings
of two white men will do more for the black folks of Mississippi than any event since we
integrated the schools” (208). The organization and the local black minister in charge of
raising money for Carl Lee are portrayed as solely interested in political and personal
gain, and the novel makes it clear that the minister is “taking his cut” of all the money he
raises (269).
Neither the vicious attacks by the KKK or the transparent machinations of the
NAACP can be characterized as social commentary in the novel; they are merely regional
details that add color and excitement to the hero’s story without prompting any need for
genuine introspection. Although he wants to see Carl Lee go free, the motives behind
Jake’s dogged attachment to the case remain somewhat murky. In the end, the victory
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doesn’t belong to him at all, but to a member of the jury, Wanda Womack.
Remembering her address after the trial, Jake happens to stop by her house, and is told
that “She won it for you. […] She made them all close their eyes and listen to her. She
told them to pretend that the little girl had blond hair and blue eyes, that the two rapists
were black […] And then she told them to imagine that the little girl belonged to them”
(513). In an even more explicit reminder of the threat which drives the racial ideology of
The Birth of a Nation, this proves to have been the decisive factor: the jury’s ability to
imagine a black rapist and a white victim. However, this realization arrives almost as an
afterthought on the novel’s penultimate page, and fails to elicit any further discussion,
from Jake or anyone else, about what a victory on these terms implies about the state of
race relations.
All of this changes dramatically in the film version, which transfers the novel’s
plot to the screen intact, but provides Jake with a character arc reminiscent of Anderson’s
identity crisis in Mississippi Burning. The film makes Roark’s character much more
antagonistic, prompting a discussion with Jake about the death penalty to quickly get
heated. Jake, becoming annoyed, says, “Roark, spare me your northern, liberal, cry-mea-river, we-are -the-only-enlightened-ones-in-the-northern-hemisphere bullshit,”
prompting her to call him “just another repressed, hypocritical southern provincial” and
storm out. The exchange reveals both of their inner prejudices, as well as Jake’s
resentment of non-southern attitudes of superiority and his own staunchly southern
identity, which goes largely unquestioned until later in the film. However, a much
clearer antagonist emerges in the film as Jake’s southern opposite: Freddie Lee Cobb, the
brother of one of the rapists. Cobb, enraged by the murder of his brother, makes contact
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with the Klan and founds a new chapter of the organization in his county. He is the
instigator behind every violent act, including wielding a sniper rifle in an attempt to
murder Jake as he exits the courthouse (a national guardsman is hit instead). After Sisson
is killed, the other Klan members seem inclined to depart, but Cobb rallies them to
continue. He is the face of redneck racism in the film, representing everything that Jake
must defeat.
Jake’s journey remains largely beneath the surface for much of the movie as the
plot follows the chain of events laid out in the novel, with two significant differences.
First, Jake’s wife (having left town with their daughter after the attempted bombing)
returns in the film to offer moral support. Second, Carl Lee remains completely loyal to
Jake as his attorney, and never seems to so much as contemplate firing him. The reason
for these changes becomes clear in two scenes that occur just before the closing
arguments of the trial. In the first scene, Jake’s wife appears in the doorway of his office
on the eve of the final day of the trial and finds him at his lowest point. She has returned
to offer forgiveness for everything that has happened (the disruption of their lives, the
loss of their home), and to explain Jake’s interest in the case: “I thought you took this
case because you wanted to prove to everybody what a big-time lawyer you were, but I
was wrong. You took this case because if those boys had hurt Hanna the way that they
hurt Tonya, you would have killed them yourself.” Jake is committed to Carl Lee’s
defense because he identifies with his actions as a father, and the experience of
fatherhood that they share has made it possible for him to, in some sense, cross the racial
divide and see the world through Carl Lee’s eyes. In the very next scene, Jake visits Carl
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Lee in jail to tell him he thinks the case is lost and that it is time for Carl Lee to cop a
plea. His client won’t hear of it, and has something to explain to Jake, as well:
You think just like them. That's why I picked you. [...] When you look at me, you
don't see a man. You see a black man. [...] We on different sides of the line. Our
daughters, Jake, they ain't never gonna play together. [...] You my secret weapon
cuz you one of the bad guys. You don't mean to be, but you are. It's how you was
raised. [...] You see me like that jury sees me. You are one of them. [...] If you
was on that jury, what would it take to convince you to set me free? That's how
you save my ass. That's how you save us both.
Carl Lee sees Jake’s southern identity as the key to success in the trial, although by this
point it is clear that Jake is uncomfortable with that identity. He fidgets and protests
throughout Carl Lee’s speech, but finally has nothing left to say in response. He
recognizes the truth, but he does not like it. This self-awareness is also the key to his
ability to change, but first he must win Carl Lee’s case.
This he proceeds to do with a dramatic closing argument borrowed directly from
Wanda Womack’s contribution in the novel. He begins his speech by telling the jury
what he has learned (“I set out to prove that a black man can receive a fair trial in the
South. [...] But that's not the truth.”), then commands them to close their eyes while he
describes the rape in graphic detail for some four excruciating minutes. Finally, he
concludes: “I want you to picture that little girl. Now imagine she’s white.” By
reassigning this speech to Jake, the film strengthens his victory, and underscores his
recognition of the problematic nature of his southern identity that Carl Lee has
illuminated. A few minutes later, in the film’s final scene, Jake arrives at Carl Lee’s
victory party with his family. As his wife takes their daughter over and introduces her to
Carl Lee’s daughter, Jake tells Carl Lee, “I just thought our kids could play together.”
The two stand, facing each other, smiling, as the uplifting music of a gospel choir fades
into the soundtrack and the image gives way to the closing credits. Carl Lee, in
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exploiting Jake’s southern identity to help win his defense, has made Jake aware of it and
what it means. Now, he leaves it firmly behind him in order to embrace racial
reconciliation. Still, although there are many other sympathetic white characters, Jake
and his family are the only white faces present at the gathering, and it remains to be seen
whether Jake will be able to reconcile his new identity with life in Mississippi, as
Anderson has clearly failed to in Mississippi Burning.
Grisham returned to these issues much more explicitly in The Chamber, which
seems to have been loosely inspired by the 1994 trial of Byron De La Beckwith for the
murder of Medgar Evers in 1963, a trial which would also form the basis for the film
Ghosts of Mississippi. Whereas Grisham had completed the writing of A Time to Kill
prior to the release of Mississippi Burning, prompting changes to the film version that
emphasized the sudden interest in southern identity conflicts, The Chamber seems to
indicate Grisham’s awareness of, and response to, this growing trend. In the novel,
Adam Hall learns that his real name is Alan Cayhall, and he was born in Clanton,
Mississippi (the same fictional town that serves as the setting for A Time to Kill). His
family changed their names and moved away in 1967, after his Klansman grandfather,
Sam, bombed the offices of a Jewish lawyer, killing two young children. As the novel
begins, Sam sits on death row, nearing execution, and Adam, now a lawyer, has taken a
job with the large Chicago firm that is handling Sam’s appeals. He hopes to take over the
case, meet his grandfather for the first time, and save his life. As Peter Robson explains,
“Unlike Jake Brigance, who was comfortable with the notion of the death penalty, Adam
Hall is against the barbarity of judicial murder” (160). Grisham had undergone a reversal
in his opinion about the death penalty between writing the two novels, and The Chamber
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is his extended attempt to make a case against the death penalty in the form of a novel.
The result is long-winded and didactic, but Grisham could have chosen many ways to
communicate this message, and the way he chose contains an obvious crisis of southern
identity. Adam is opposed to the death penalty, but he is also looking for answers about
himself, to understand who he is and where his family comes from. Early in the novel,
we see that he has made a video of all of the news footage associated with his
grandfather’s crime and subsequent trial, which he watches obsessively. Although he has
grown up entirely outside the South, not learning about his heritage until late
adolescence, he is finally about to come face to face with that past in the form of his
grandfather.
The man he meets is bitter and mean; an unregenerate racist from a family of
unregenerate racists. Soon, the family secrets begin to surface. He eventually learns
from his grandfather that the previous three generations of Cayhalls were members of the
KKK. His Aunt Lee tells him how Sam murdered the father of one his son’s playmates, a
killing that Adam’s father Eddie blamed himself for, and about a lynching Sam
participated in as a teenager along with his father and brothers. She has an old book with
a photograph of Sam at the lynching in it, which she offers to show Adam. He refuses,
but several days later he decides that he is “ready to face the lynch mob” (554), and pulls
the book out. He is shocked by what he sees, but also begins to conjure up a flood of
excuses:
[Sam] was just a boy, born and reared in a household where hatred of blacks and
others was simply a way of life. […] Sam didn’t have a chance. This was the only
world he knew. […] How could he fairly judge these people […] when […] he
would’ve been right there in the middle of them had he been born forty years
earlier? […] Though Sam was obviously a willing participant, he was only one
member of the mob, only partly guilty. […] How in God’s world could Sam
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Cayhall have become anything other than himself? He never had a chance. (556557)
Later, he learns that Sam is also the hooded Klansman who appears in another lynching
picture in the book. By the time his sister comes to visit, Adam seems to have decided
that, with or without attempts at justification, he would rather not reveal to her what he
has learned: “Adam had been very careful. He’d hit the peaks and skipped the woeful
valleys—no mention of Joe Lincoln or lynchings or sketchy hints of other crimes” (573).
Meanwhile, all of Sam’s legal recourses fail to forestall the execution, and he is
ultimately put to death. Adam spends the final pages of the novel with Lee at the
gravesite where his grandfather will soon be buried. Adam informs her that he intends to
move back to Mississippi in order to practice law and battle the death penalty. This is
almost the identity crisis in reverse, with Adam recovering and restoring his own
southern identity. However, Lee tells Adam that she has bought the old house where the
family lived when she was a child, and burned it down the night before as Sam was being
executed: “Evil things happened there. It was filled with demons and spirits. Now they’re
gone. […] They’ve gone off to haunt someone else” (674). The corner of the South that
he is returning to has been purged of everything that tied it to the racial crimes of his
forefathers. Adam’s father had taken the step of rejecting his southern identity years
before, leaving the region completely and changing his name. Now, his son can return,
but Sam will remain the last of the Cayhalls, and his grandson will be a new kind of
southerner with a new name, a compassionate man seeking to overturn the death penalty,
in a new kind of South that has no place for Sam, his house, or his name.
The plot remains virtually identical in the film version, though somewhat
condensed from the nearly-700 pages of the novel. The film, seeking to generate
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additional suspense, places a much greater emphasis on a subplot involving Rollie
Wedge, the man who built the bomb and masterminded the bombing for which Sam is
being executed. In both novel and film, investigators remain suspicious about whether
Sam acted alone in the bombing, but in the novel, Wedge watches the appeals process
from a distance and keeps his tracks well hidden, and finally disappears as the execution
draws nearer. In the film, Adam and an assistant provided by the governor desperately
investigate the old files, looking for evidence of the accomplice. As the assistant says,
echoing a line from Mississippi Burning, “You're in Mississippi now. Land of the secrets.
Dead bodies buried everywhere.” Although Sam is put to death anyway, as the governor
gives a speech shortly before the execution, Wedge is shown being taken into custody as
a result of the evidence Adam has uncovered, laying the crime even more firmly to rest
than in the novel. The film also places a greater emphasis on the photo of the lynching,
and Adam uses it as part of Sam’s insanity defense at a final hearing, claiming that the
environment in which he was raised made it impossible for him to conceive of acting any
other way. However, at the end of the film, Lee doesn’t mention burning her father’s
house, and Adam says nothing about moving back to the South. He has faced down his
family’s southern demons, but Hollywood does not seem quite ready for a character to
regain his southern identity, even a regenerated one. Instead, as Adam and his aunt
embrace just before the final fade-out, he simply says, “Maybe the ghosts are gone, Lee.”
He had spoken too soon. Three months after The Chamber was released, Ghosts
of Mississippi appeared in theaters with another story (this one true) of a Klan killer on
trial in the present-day for crimes committed decades earlier. This time, though, (in
direct contrast with both Grisham novels) the killer is the clear villain, and it is the
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prosecutor who is the hero. The black community features much more prominently in
this story, particularly Evers’ loyal wife Myrlie, who continues to seek justice for the
murder for over a quarter century before finally finding someone who is willing to
prosecute Beckwith again, but the protagonist is still white. The film begins with an
extended flashback, showing the murder and subsequent mistrials in the 1960s. During
that first trial, as Myrlie sits in the witness stand, she watches in shock as the governor of
Mississippi slips into the courtroom and makes his way over to shake the murderer’s
hand. A reporter covering the trial protests to a colleague, “There isn’t a court in
America that would stand for that!” “What’s America got do with anything?” the other
replies. “This is Mississippi.” The exchange echoes quotes from both Mississippi
Burning and The Chamber: “You in Mississippi now.” Again there is a strong sense that
this part of the country is not actually a part of the country at all.
Although it begins in 1963 and seems poised to place Myrlie center-stage in the
story, the action soon moves to 1989 and we are introduced to the real central character
of the movie: Bobby DeLaughter, a white southern lawyer serving as Deputy District
Attorney in Jackson, Mississippi (again, a redeemed southern man of law). A principled
but somewhat complacent father of three, DeLaughter comes to identify strongly with
Medgar Evers, who was gunned down in front of his wife and three children. Like Jake
Brigance, DeLaughter forges a strong connection across racial boundaries because he
understands the other man as a father. And, like Agent Anderson, DeLaughter soon finds
himself awkwardly dangling between two cultures as he reluctantly begins to look into
reopening the Beckwith case. He is inspired by the courage and determination of Mrs.
Evers, and convicted by his own conscience as a well-educated American man of the
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1990s, both of which make him inclined to pursue the case. On the other hand, he faces
the opposition of, not only a large and very vocal (and violent) segment of the Mississippi
population, but of his own family in the form of his wife and mother.
In fact, as he insistently pursues the case into the evidence-gathering stage, his
wife leaves him, ashamed and unable to face the disapproval of her own friends and
family. On her way out the door, she asks her husband what happened to them. “People
change,” he tells her. “Are you saying I’ve changed?” she protests. “I’m saying you
haven’t.” DeLaughter is well aware that the Evers case has changed him. He can hardly
help but be aware of it. The further he proceeds, the more difficult circumstances
become. His car is vandalized, his children get into fights, and he is forced to move them
into a hotel when they receive a bomb threat at home late one night. Unlike in the
fictional Clanton of A Time to Kill, no violence actually ensues. However, like Jake he
also faces suspicion from the local black community, who don’t quite believe that a white
government official in Mississippi is really working in their interest. The excruciatingly
slow process lasts for years, finally coming to trial in 1994.
In that time, a great deal has changed for DeLaughter, including his attitude
towards his own culture. Early in the film, we see him play out a ritual with his young
daughter when she comes into his room to complain that “the ghost is back.” DeLaughter
humors her, carrying her back to bed and pretending to be able to see the ghost as well.
He tells her that his mother told him as a child that ghosts can be made to leave if they
hear their favorite song, and that all ghosts are known to love “Dixie.” Together they sing
the song and banish the ghost. Later on, after his wife has left him, DeLaughter is sitting
alone in bed when his phone rings. On the other end of the line is Beckwith, who has
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called to deliver an ominous but vague threat against the life of the new star witness.
DeLaughter has just finished the conversation when his daughter comes in to inform him
that the ghost has returned to her room once more. He scoops her back into bed, and she
asks him to sing “Dixie” for her again. Haunted by the specter of Beckwith and all that
he represents, DeLaughter finds himself unable and unwilling to sing the song. Finally,
he tells the little girl, “Maybe Dixie’s not the right song after all,” and together they settle
on the more innocuous “Old MacDonald.” The unpleasant associations of the song have
overwhelmed his desire to sing it, and you can see in his expression that he is thinking of
the legacy he is passing on to his daughter, as well. He must reject the southern anthem
and even the small tricks of parenting which his racist mother has passed on to him in
order to steer away from the darker connotations of his culture. With these cultural
demons defeated, the only thing that remains is to go through the dramatic motions of the
trial scene. After the jury returns its guilty verdict, DeLaughter and his family join
Myrlie Evers and her family on the courthouse steps to celebrate before a jubilant crowd.
Interestingly, Ghosts of Mississippi shares an unlikely historical link to its 1988
predecessor, at least according to Fred Zollo, who produced both films. As Zollo tells it,
the real-life DeLaughter reopened the Beckwith case partially as a result of a series of
investigative articles written by local reporter Jerry Mitchell, who in turn claimed to have
been inspired by the heightened interest in Civil Rights brought about by Mississippi
Burning. Additionally, shortly after the release of Mississippi Burning, former Neshoba
County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey sued Zollo for the unfavorable portrayal of his fictional
alter-ego in the film. While researching Zollo’s defense, lawyer John Ables discovered
Klandestine, a book about a KKK member who became an informant to the FBI. Years
103
later, Klandestine provided a crucial break in the Beckwith case when it led DeLaughter
to use the informant as a witness. So, by this somewhat tenuous and convoluted route,
Mississippi Burning, inspired by a racially motivated murder in the South in 1964,
inspired the long-overdue resolution of a racially motivated murder in the South in 1963,
which in its turn inspired the film Ghosts of Mississippi. It is a perfect example of “the
tangled contemporary relationship between history and historical reenactment” (Graham
150).
However, Zollo’s account neglects a final chapter to the story which Parker
alludes to more than once in his commentary on Mississippi Burning: That the obsessive
telling and retelling of a story can breathe new life into spirits long since laid to rest. It is
somewhat disturbing to watch the scene of a church being consumed by flames during the
opening credits of Mississippi Burning and hear Parker casually observe that this is “one
of the many churches that we burned.” That is, in order to recreate the image, the film
crew actually located and burned down three existing church structures. Even Parker,
after a moment’s reflection, is forced to acknowledge that “it felt pretty weird doing it.”
He recalls further discomfort during the scenes depicting Klan violence, particularly the
lynching scene. The director also vividly recalls the displeasure of the townspeople of
Lafayette, Alabama (where he filmed his small-town exteriors) when the crew set up
burning crosses for various scenes involving Klan intimidation. The phenomenon is
hardly limited to the earlier movie, though. Crosses are also burned and fully robed and
hooded Klansmen march through the streets of the town in A Time to Kill, filmed onlocation in Canton, Mississippi. Even The Chamber stages a brief brawl between
Klansmen and others outside the state prison. However, perhaps the most disturbing of
104
these resurrections of the past is James Woods’ incredible, repulsive immortalization of
Byron De La Beckwith for Ghosts of Mississippi. The film was nominated for two
Oscars, one for Woods performance (he disappears completely into his role) and another
for the makeup that aged the younger actor a quarter century to play a geriatric bigot.
Acclaimed Mississippi novelist Willie Morris worked as a consultant on the film, and
later wrote a book about the production. In it, he describes his own occasional
ambivalence at the often all-too-literal evocations of Mississippi ghosts: “this uncanny
blending of the ‘real’ and the re-created ‘unreal,’ between the authentic fact and the
filmed fact, between the shadow and the act, would make it exceedingly difficult for me
to distinguish the two: layer upon layer of ironies, of painful and public personal
memories, surreal to me in their unfolding” (31-32). As a native of Mississippi, Morris is
uncomfortable with the implications of the film crew’s attention to detail in bringing this
story back to life.
*****
More important than any other consideration, perhaps, is the question of what
impression all of this might have made on a region still working to heal the scars of a notso-distant past. After bringing integration to the South during the 1960s, outsiders
returned to the region throughout the 1990s to erect the symbols of racial segregation and
intolerance once more and re-enact scenes of racial strife. Culturally, then, the South is
still being used as a colony to the rest of the nation as Carson McCullers suggested,
possibly to the detriment of both. Nevertheless, both Ghosts of Mississippi and A Time to
Kill, end with glowing portraits of restored community. But then, as a document of the
immediate past, Ghosts of Mississippi can afford to pretend that the evils of racism (as
105
embodied by Beckwith) have been somehow defeated, or at least banished for a while.
Now, it seems to say, the ghosts really are gone, and DeLaughter’s experience indicates
that the only way to be rid of them is not to sing them their favorite song: Dixie. In other
words, white southern culture cannot be redeemed. Only white southerners themselves
can hope for redemption, and only by abandoning their culture to its ghosts, and (of
course) to the unblinking gaze of the movie cameras, which don’t seem inclined to
abandon the region anytime soon.
106
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